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The wave function has embedded within it an imaginary number. That’s an appropriate label, because an imaginary number consists of the square root of a negative number, which by definition does not exist. Although it gives you the answer you want, the wave function doesn’t correspond to anything in the real world. It works, but no one knows why. The same can be said of the Schrödinger equation. Maybe we should look at the Schrödinger equation not as a discovery but as an invention, an arbitrary, contingent, historical accident, as much so as the Greek and Arabic symbols with which we represent functions and numbers. After all, physicists arrived at the Schrödinger equation and other canonical quantum formulas only haltingly, after many false steps.— John Horgan
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