Kind: captions
Language: en
- So, what's the wave function?
You said it's an interesting detail but
in any interpretation, what is
the wave function in quantum mechanics?
- Well, you know, we had this idea
from Rutherford that atoms look like
little solar systems,
but people very quickly
realized that can't possibly be right
because if an electron
is orbiting in a circle
it will give off light, all the light
that we have in this room comes from
electrons zooming up and down, wiggling
and that's what electromagnetic waves are
and you can calculate
how long would it take
for the electron just to
spiral into the nucleus
and the answer is 10 to
the -11 seconds, okay?
A hundred billionth of a second.
So that's not right, meanwhile
people had realized that light
which we understood from
the 1800s was a wave
had properties that were
similar to that of particles.
This is Einstein and
Plonk and stuff like that.
So, if something that we agree was
a wave had particle-like properties
then maybe something
we think is a particle
the electron has wave-like
properties, right?
And so a bunch of people eventually
came to the conclusion don't think about
the electron as a little point particle
orbiting like a solar system, think of it
as a wave that is spread out, and they
cleverly gave this the
name the wave function
which is the dopiest name in the world
for one of the most profound things
in the universe, there's
literally a number
at every point in space,
which is the value
of the electron's wave
function at that point.
- And there's only, there's
only one wave function.
- Yeah, they eventually figured that out.
That took longer, but when you have
two electrons, you do not have
a wave function for electron one
and a wave function for electron two.
You have one combined wave function
for both of them, and indeed, as you say.
There's only one wave function
for the entire universe at once.