| > It is not a breakthrough, it is just something we refuse to see, something that was known for a century. This sounds like you're about to try selling me a crystal and a magic ritual. The wording here is far too grandiose, and I assure you physicists are not "refusing to see" that "everything is a wave". Whatever you imagine that might mean. > The very notion of calling it "qunatum" physics is probably wrong since quantum is "a discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents." > And if everything is a wave there are no discrete quantities beyond our definition of what constitutes the end, or borders, of the wave. Mumbo-jumbo. It's called "quantum" physics because of the discovery that many parts of nature do indeed exist in discrete steps. Yes, electron orbitals are described with wave functions - that is, the electron exists as a probability cloud, but the functions themselves are still discrete! When an electron gains energy, it jumps from one orbital to another without passing through a continuous state in the middle. That is the fundamental insight of Quantum Mechanics - energy, momentum, etc are all quantized and not actually continuous. The wikipedia article on quantum mechanics literally covers this in the intro - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics |
The field is the continuous state so nothing has to jump through anything.
For example the hydrogen wave function does not tell us where the electron will be located, only where most likely will be located. What is discrete about that?