Timeline for Quantum simple harmonic oscillator interpretation
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 7, 2015 at 12:26 | vote | accept | Rammus | ||
| Jun 7, 2015 at 10:09 | answer | added | Pietro Novelli | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jun 7, 2015 at 9:33 | answer | added | anna v | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jan 18, 2015 at 1:18 | comment | added | DanielSank | "Is it just a SHO of a quantum particle, seems a little too obvious for quantum theory?" What does that mean? Why do you expect that quantum mechanics applies only to complicated systems? | |
| Jan 18, 2015 at 1:17 | history | edited | DanielSank | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 18, 2015 at 0:46 | answer | added | Timaeus | timeline score: 1 | |
| Dec 21, 2014 at 2:37 | comment | added | Peter Shor | And phonons are also very close to being harmonic oscillators. | |
| Dec 21, 2014 at 2:03 | comment | added | DanielSank | @PeterShor: Indeed, it is extremely close to being harmonic. The deviations from harmonic behavior come only from the fact that the electromagnetic field can interact with charged particle fields. At high enough energies (really ridiculously high) the electromagnetic wave can create (virtual) charged particles which then interact back with the electromagnetic wave and spoil the harmonic behavior. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 21:16 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Isn't a single mode of an electromagnetic wave (i.e., photon states) a really good approximation to a harmonic oscillator? | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 20:25 | comment | added | Sofia | @PeterBrown : what I saw is that people trust sometimes formulas that apply to similar, but not identical cases, or make some mistakes from lack of attention. This is why I don't trust math without checking intermediate results, and so. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 20:06 | comment | added | Rammus | @Sofia I've always trusted the maths although I do realise that you can extend the maths far beyond something which could be defined as 'physically reasonable'. I guess sometimes solid maths doesn't lie but just talks a bit of nonsense. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 20:00 | comment | added | Sofia | @PeterBrown: I am always suspicious on math results s.t. I always check if they make sense. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:45 | comment | added | CuriousOne | @JamalS: LOL! That's a really good one! | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:41 | comment | added | JamalS | @CuriousOne: "The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction." - Sidney Coleman. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:30 | comment | added | CuriousOne | My first theoretical physics professor motivated the importance of the classic harmonic oscillator with the following joke: "When theoreticians have to describe a cow, they will automatically assume that she is spherical. And if that's not enough to solve the problem, they will additionally assume that she is homogeneously covered in milk". Ergo, WYSIWYG, a harmonic quantum oscillator. It's one of the few systems that we can solve completely, the solution space is easy to understand and there is hope that it's a useful toy system for everything from phonons to quantum gravity. | |
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:20 | review | First posts | |||
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:20 | |||||
| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:15 | history | edited | Qmechanic♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 20, 2014 at 18:11 | history | asked | Rammus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |