(June 3, 2013 at 9:57 pm)Zarith Wrote: At least the way I understand it (and I'm no expert), that's precisely the case. Things can exhibit wave-like behavior or particle-like behavior or some mixture of the two even, but in either case the rules for calculating event probabilities using complex probability amplitudes are the same. The computational framework asserts neither wave nor particle, but something else entirely. It seems alien because it's absent from our everyday macro experience, and yet it describes the observed phenomena quite accurately.
Quantum logic is slightly different than classical logic, but the difference amounts to a whole lot. Just as an illustration, the probability of rolling a 2 or a 5 from a die, would be P =1/6 + 1/6 = 1/3. Here I've just added the probabilities. But in QM, you would need to add amplitude and then square to get the probability. P = [ψ(2) +ψ(5)]^2 = ψ(2)ψ(2) + ψ(2)ψ(5) + ψ(5)ψ(2) + ψ(5)ψ(5). You get a whole bunch of terms that describe interference, which you don't get in classical physics. The real mystery of QM is why this works, and not some other scheme.
