What is the wave function?

The wave function is the quantum description of the amplitudes of the physical system that is classically described as a particle.

You are wrong. The wave function really IS the particle. Everything that may seem obscure about what we refer to as particles comes from this misunderstanding. There is nothing more fundamental than the wave function. There is no hidden, tiny object weaved into the wave function. You'll see that once you let go of that idea, quantum field theories suddenly become much clearer and much less absurd.

So is the electron a point on the wave function, or the complete probability distribution?

Basically represents how likely something is to be detected. If particles behaved like normal classical points the possibility of finding the electron would be constrained in a circular orbit around the nucleus of an atom. However, that's not how atoms work, and so the electron is actually not constrained at all purely to a circular orbit around the nucleus and instead has the same characteristics of detection as if it was a wave and not a particle. But of course when he make a measurement it collapses into having the same properties of a particle.

In quantum field theory this is not the case. It's just a model that fits our empirical observations as absurd as it is.

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Poor. Study quantum physics before giving out your help.

The electron has no well defined position while it exists in that form.

That's from a book written by a very famous physicist

an atom is a combined excitation of the force carrying fields. the wave function is a generalization of all of these interactions, wrt those particles. this is what I think qcd is trying to figure out, the how and why of quark interactions with the force fields.

also, its always important to remember that the only 1 to 1 representation of the universe that exists is the universe itself. we can only ever approximate.

yeah, the bogdanoffs
>famous physicist

The probability of a particle changing your energy state per time.

This is just saying there is no atom with set parameters. The wavefunction describes/bounds this lack of parameters.

can i get a quick rundown on them?

No

>because of the holographic principle that states your experience of 3D space is actually just a projection of a two-dimensional topology.
Except that's entirely speculative and we don't even know how to make it work in our universe.
No, it's the distribution of probability amplitudes, not probability. Classical statistical physics used probabilities, quantum mechanics uses probability amplitudes.

>The wave function really IS the particle
No, no, no! Quantum mechanics is not a realist theory, the wave function is not a physical object at all.

Stop thinking that the world is filled with objects. Reality is a process.

>No, it's the distribution of probability amplitudes, not probability
That's the same fucking thing. A PDF is a probability distribution.

Nah, the square of the wavefunction in space is the probability distribution of the object's location. The wavefunction itself includes phase information which is lost after squaring it.