ABSTRACT
It was Erwin Schrodinger who, in 1925, discovered an appropriate form of wave equation, making use of some deep formal analogies between optics and classical particle mechanics that had been evolved in the nineteenth century by W. R. Hamilton and others. There is all the accumulated evidence that the Schrodinger equations work; they provide the basis for a correct analysis of all kinds of molecular, atomic, and nuclear systems. The theoretical basis for the existence of states of discrete energies emerges more or less directly from the wave-particle duality; one of the most familiar features of classical wave behavior is that of standing waves. The quantum amplitudes for a particle in a bound state can be normalized. In order to make the statistical interpretation of the wave function more precise, we need to use the quantitative ideas of probability distributions.
