But if it were just combining waves with a definite oscillation and adding them up, that would be a piece of cake for a computer to do. |
If I set up waves with known amplitudes and synthesize them, I'll find that for essentially all random combinations of phases, the thing I get is an object not confined. It takes a very clever combination of the phases of all those waves to add up to something in only one region; and cancel out everywhere else. |
People used to say that's an impossible problem. Then people got to thinking about the fact that there are going to be constraints coming from some rather mundane facts -- that in principle will make the problem of deducing the phase like the solution of a solvable puzzle. |