1. Another look through Heisenberg’s microscope
- Author
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Stephen P. Boughn and Marcel Reginatto
- Subjects
0106 biological sciences ,Physics ,Quantum Physics ,Free particle ,Physics - History and Philosophy of Physics ,Measure (physics) ,FOS: Physical sciences ,General Physics and Astronomy ,01 natural sciences ,Indeterminacy (literature) ,Physics::History of Physics ,Schrödinger equation ,Momentum ,Theoretical physics ,symbols.namesake ,Heisenberg's microscope ,Position (vector) ,0103 physical sciences ,symbols ,History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) ,Quantum Physics (quant-ph) ,010306 general physics ,Quantum ,010606 plant biology & botany - Abstract
Heisenberg introduced his famous uncertainty relations in a seminal 1927 paper entitled "The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Mechanics". He motivated his arguments with a gedanken experiment, a gamma ray microscope to measure the position of a particle. A primary result was that, due to the quantum nature of light, there is an inherent uncertainty in the determinations of the particle's position and momentum dictated by an indeterminacy relation, $\delta q \delta p \sim h$. Heisenberg offered this demonstration as "a direct physical interpretation of the [quantum mechanical] equation $\textbf{pq} - \textbf{qp} = -i\hbar$" but considered the indeterminacy relation to be much more than this. He also argued that it implies limitations on the very meanings of position and momentum and emphasized that these limitations are the source of the statistical character of quantum mechanics. In addition, Heisenberg hoped but was unable to demonstrate that the laws of quantum mechanics could be derived directly from the uncertainty relation. In this paper, we revisit Heisenberg's microscope and argue that the Schr\"odinger equation for a free particle does indeed follow from the indeterminacy relation together with reasonable statistical assumptions., Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure European Journal of Physics (in press)
- Published
- 2018
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