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 Originally Posted by Renton
Yeah I still completely don't get it. How can a wave be an omnidirectional sphere propagation that has the same amount of energy even as it gets exponentially larger?
The magnitude of the wave gets exponentially diminished as the wavefront grows. The integral of the probability function over all space is always equal to 1 for each particle.
There is a mathematical step called "normalization" that is required to solve for the wave function explicitly. This is because there is a need to eliminate a variable from the equation in order to determine its magnitude. It amounts to saying that for each particle, there is exactly 1 particle and it's definitely somewhere in the universe.
Originally Posted by Renton
I just don't understand what the wave is aside from being an expression of the probability of the locations that the photon could be detected.
The problem is that there is simply no well-defined position function for massless photons.
It's quite complicated to visualize at this stage. A photon is a quantum of the electromagnetic fields, in a measurable sense. That quantum is expressed with a certain momentum, which is proportional to its electromagnetic wavelength.
Note that the electromagnet fields are indeed waving. The propagation of light is explained by Maxwell's equations quite well.
What is confusing is just what you said. The probability function expands with diminishing probability as it spreads out. Yet, the particle is somehow only ever in one place. NOT spread out.
It's a mind bender, and we're jumping beyond physics to try to explain "why" anything is how it is. Physics is primarily aimed at explaining what something is and does, but struggles at why after a certain point.
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