Wave Structure of Matter

Wave Structure of Matter [+ favourites]

I want to get a more rounded understanding of how Einstein and those after him described matter as "wave-centers".

From my understanding, physics currently most accurately concludes that all matter is the result of waves that are a property of space. (space being... everything?)

These spherical waves are scalar waves of quantum theory, not vector electromagnetic waves (in other words, they don't have direction only amplitude).

Particles of matter appear in the center of where these waves intersect.

Hence, every particle of matter is made up of a series of these spherical waves, and any particles in proximity are likely made of of many similar spherical waves, all intersecting to create what we believe to be matter.

If possible, can someone try to go into more detail and explain how time relates to this theory and also where these waves come from and how they affect each other?

(I'm addressing this to anyone who has a good understanding of these concepts in a conceptual way, not just repeat what we might find by doing a search on Google)

"Hating everyone protects me from elitism."

If you're referring to wave mechanics that was the original formulation of quantum mechanics then it goes something like this. A function called a wave function is associated with every particle. It's not like a conventional wave. It is generally complex valued for a start. Probabilistic information about the particles position and velocity is encoded in the wave function. This information is extracted by applying various volume integrals to various expressions involving the wave function. For instance the volume integral of the wave function times its conjugate give the probability of finding the particle in that volume.

Of course you can get 4 variable time depended wave functions of both a classical and relativistic variety but that's the gist of it.

Differential equations describe the interaction of various wave functions and potentials. Generally this interaction is based on a probabilistic analysis of the normal inverse square law. The differential or differential - integral equations generally describe energy conservation laws. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation for more.

So in early quantum mechanics the 'waves' are no more than a convenient way to encode the probabilistic treatment of particles obeying conventional physical laws.

A wave packet is essentially a wave function that pins down a particle to a small region of space. By having the large values of probability for finding the particle concentrated in a small area. the most likely area for the particle to be found is in the large humps of the function obtained by multiplying the wave function by it's conjugate. that function may not look very much like a wave but more like a ripple. A moving lump like ripple rather than the circular sort. Yet the wave function is unlikely to be a lump but will have osolations in its argument, the relationship between it's real and imaginary part.

[  Edited by CodeWarrior at   ]

That was very constructive codewarrior, did that help Decius?
Kind of sounds like diffraction & reflexion patterns, where those conside matter exists? Or what we calll matter exist?

"Terrorist or tyrant, few may come to the Truth that both are poor choice."