/sci/ - Science & Math

What's the deal with wave particle duality?

Do particles turn into wave packets and visa versa at random, or are "particle" and "wave packet" just different mathematicaly ways of describing the same thing and you just use whatever is more intuitive at a given moment

so according to de broglie, matter is just a wave?

i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that huge masses are actually vibrating at an enormous frequency

Hey /sci/, I need help with part of this simple quantum mechanics problem. I have a wave function, psi, for a free particle and I'm calculating the probability that the particle's linear momentum results in a certain value. I can calculate the probability, but in order to do that I need to multiply the wave function by its complex conjugate, and I'm not sure what that is.

This is my wave function: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%283%29%2F2e^%28ikx%29%2B1%2F2e^%28-ikx%29

For this problem, the professor wants each step in terms of e, not sin or cos. This is why I'm not sure whether I need to flip the sign of exponent of the real portion of the equation in addition to the unreal portion, or just to the unreal portion. Help would be much appreciated.