Born rule
The born rule is a fancy way of talking about what happens when you measure something in quantum mechanics. It helps us figure out the chances (or probabilities) of getting different results when we measure something.
Here's an example: let's say you have a toy box filled with different colors of marbles. You want to know the chance of picking out a blue marble when you reach in and grab one blindly. The chances depend on how many blue marbles are in the box and how many total marbles there are.
In quantum mechanics, things can get complicated because what we're measuring isn't a physical object like a marble, but something called a wave function. The wave function tells us the chances of a particle being in different places or having different properties.
To figure out the chances of something happening, we use the born rule. It says that the chance of measuring a certain property (like position or momentum) of a particle is equal to the absolute value of a part of that wave function squared. That might sound like a lot of gibberish, but it's really just a formula for figuring out how likely different outcomes are when you measure something in quantum mechanics.
Here's an example: let's say you have a toy box filled with different colors of marbles. You want to know the chance of picking out a blue marble when you reach in and grab one blindly. The chances depend on how many blue marbles are in the box and how many total marbles there are.
In quantum mechanics, things can get complicated because what we're measuring isn't a physical object like a marble, but something called a wave function. The wave function tells us the chances of a particle being in different places or having different properties.
To figure out the chances of something happening, we use the born rule. It says that the chance of measuring a certain property (like position or momentum) of a particle is equal to the absolute value of a part of that wave function squared. That might sound like a lot of gibberish, but it's really just a formula for figuring out how likely different outcomes are when you measure something in quantum mechanics.