One question that comes up immediately is why we never see big objects like tables, chairs, or ourselves behave like waves.Īs a heuristic argument, recall de Broglie’s relationship between the wavelength and the momentum of a 'matter wave': So what, exactly, does quantum mechanics tell us about physical reality? Schrödinger's equation grew out of the idea that particles such as electrons behave like particles in some situations and like waves in others: that's the so-called wave-particle duality (see the first article of this series).
For example, with our particle in a box gives the probability density for finding the particle at position But it is also possible to solve Schrödinger’s equation for many particle systems and to find wave functions for other observable quantities, for example the momenta of the particles. In quantum mechanics the information about the system is contained in the solution to Schrödinger’s equation, a wave function The square of the absolute value of the wave function, is interpreted as a probability density. In classical mechanics what you’re after are the positions and momenta of all particles at every time : that gives you a full description of the system.
Schrödinger’s equation is to quantum mechanics what Newton’s second law of motion is to classical mechanics: it describes how a physical system, say a bunch of particles subject to certain forces, will change over time.
