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RE: Wave-particle duality aka the central pillar of quantum mechanics
That's the difficulty of chatting on the comments of a post and not lively. Let's try to do our best in understanding each other ;)
only that it expresses itself as a particle in that scenario and passes through one slit or the other.
This is however the question that cannot be answered. It is really like the particle passes through both slits at the same time, which is very counterintuitive. If the particle would pass through a single slit, then we would not get any interference pattern.
'It is really like the particle passes through both slits at the same time', yes and its where I get fuzzy, but I think we kind of believe it passes through both with a chance.
So if it passes through slit 1 with a 55% potential then we will see more interference on that side, but anyway it also went through slit 2 with a 45% potential. We always get the particle come out of the slits, but we cant be clear which one, but everything adds back up to 100% in the end. So we know it did happen, just not exactly how.
We are indeed getting closer. it is only the potential fractions that I don't understand. Do you mind explaining them further? thanks in advance!
Conceptually, this is hard to digest. But this is actually the key. Even if one may think this is not possible, data is there to tell us that it actually works.
I dont know if I can explain it because I dont properly understand it myself.
But we do see that objects like electrons arent bound to one fixed point, they kind of hop around and at any time have a range of possible locations they will appear at next, and I think the percentage chances of each new location can be calculated. So in the case of two slits, the electron can pass through both but might spend a higher proportion of its time in the vecinity of one slit versus the other.
I may have that utterly wrong, but its what I surmised from different sources.
This actually does not hold in QM. There is no way to determine the exact position of the electron. It could be there, or here, with some probabilities. Even if there is a region of space with a larger probability, at the end of the day, you cannot know where is the guy.
My confusion came from the fact that you used the word potential instead of probability ;)