H
Harmony
Guest
...something more fundamental? I was talking about this with my friend at university today (we're both physics undergrads) and was just wondering if anyone had anything to add to the discussion. Let's take an example, if you solve a simple Schrodinger equation for a finite square well you can show that there is a probability that the particle will pass through the walls of the well and out the other side- it quantum tunnels. The probability of it being beyond the wall of the well decays exponentially but never reaches zero so you could argue that the particle could be anywhere in the universe as the distance extends to infinity. The probability of it being so far away is insanely small, but it's still there. My question is that this example is something so counter intuitive that it almost seems ridiculous, and so much that quantum mechanics predicts is like this. I know that it describes things quite well, for example if the particle in the finite well couldn't tunnel then we couldn't have scanning tunnelling microscopes (STM), but do you think that quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory and although the stuff it predicts seems bizarre it is still true. Or do you think that quantum mechanics is a good approximation for now but will lead to a more fundamental theory which describes things better later on?