(February 5, 2015 at 9:18 pm)IATIA Wrote:(February 5, 2015 at 1:03 pm)Surgenator Wrote: Ahhh ... no. That is incorrect. A guassian-wave-packet is a good representation of an electron out in free space. When the wave-packet interacts with a barrier, it still remains a gaussian-wave-packet (techniquely two superpositioned gaussain-wave-packets). At no point did it go from wave to particle or back.The gaussian packet describes the probability distribution of the particle. And note that I did use "appears" rather than "is".
Electron scattering experiments show the electron "appears" as a point particle, not a wave. So saying the electron "appears" as wave when we aren't measuring it is only half right.