Position and momentum space

One of the main reasons why physicists are obsessed by this topic is that position and momentum are mapped to the phase space coordinates of Hamiltonian mechanics, which appear in the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics, which offers insight into the theory, particularly when generalizing to relativistic quantum mechanics.

One way to think is: what is the definition of space space? It is a way to write the wave function ${\psi }_x(x)$ such that:And then, what is the definition of momentum space? It is of course a way to write the wave function ${\psi }_p(p)$ such that:

physics.stackexchange.com/questions/39442/intuitive-explanation-of-why-momentum-is-the-fourier-transform-variable-of-posit/39508#39508 gives the best idea intuitive idea: the Fourier transform writes a function as a (continuous) sum of plane waves, and each plane wave has a fixed momentum.

Bibliography:

A way to write the wavefunction $\psi (x)$ such that the position operator is:i.e., a function that takes the wavefunction as input, and outputs another function:

If you believe that mathematicians took care of continuous spectrum for us and that everything just works, the most concrete and direct thing that this representation tells us is that:equals:

This operator case is surprisingly not necessarily mathematically trivial to describe formally because you often end up getting into the Dirac delta functions/continuous spectrum: as mentioned at: mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics

One dimension in position representation:

In three dimensions In position representation, we define it by using the gradient, and so we see that