Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Basically the opposite of security through obscurity, though slightly more focused on cryptography.

Huge respect to this companies.

TODO: use the results from the quantum harmonic oscillator solution to precisely illustrate the discussion at Schrödinger picture with a concrete example.

Similar to quantum jump in the Bohr model, but for the Schrödinger equation.

The idea the the wave function of a small observed system collapses "obviously" cannot be the full physical truth, only a very useful approximation of reality.

Because then are are hard pressed to determine the boundary between what collapses and what doesn't, and there isn't such a boundary, as everything is interacting, including the observer.

The many-worlds interpretation is an elegant explanation for this. Though it does feel a bit sad and superfluous.

The time-independent Schrödinger equation is a variant of the Schrödinger equation defined as:

So we see that for any Schrödinger equation, which is fully defined by the Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$, there is a corresponding time-independent Schrödinger equation, which is also uniquely defined by the same Hamiltonian.

The cool thing about the Time-independent Schrödinger equation is that we can always reduce solving the full Schrödinger equation to solving this slightly simpler time-independent version, as described at: Section "Solving the Schrodinger equation with the time-independent Schrödinger equation".

Because this method is fully general, and it simplifies the initial time-dependent problem to a time independent one, it is the approach that we will always take when solving the Schrodinger equation, see e.g. quantum harmonic oscillator.

Where derivation == "intuitive routes", since a "law of physics" cannot be derived, only observed right or wrong.

TODO also comment on why are complex numbers used in the Schrodinger equation?.

Some approaches:

The Schrödinger equation Hamiltonian has to be a Hermitian so we will have only positive energies I think: quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12113/why-does-a-hamiltonian-have-to-be-hermitian

As always, the best way to get some intuition about an equation is to solve it for some simple cases, so let's give that a try with different fixed potentials.

The wave equation contains the entire state of a particle.

From mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics remember that the wave equation is a vector in Hilbert space.

And a single vector can be represented in many different ways in different basis, and two of those ways happen to be the position and the momentum representations.

More importantly, position and momentum are first and foremost operators associated with observables: the position operator and the momentum operator. And both of their eigenvalue sets form a basis of the Hilbert space according to the spectral theorem.

When you represent a wave equation as a function, you have to say what the variable of the function means. And depending on weather you say "it means position" or "it means momentum", the position and momentum operators will be written differently.

This is well shown at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)".

Furthermore, the position and momentum representations are equivalent: one is the Fourier transform of the other: position and momentum space. Remember that notably we can always take the Fourier transform of a function in $L^2$ due to Carleson's theorem.

Then the uncertainty principle follows immediately from a general property of the Fourier transform: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fourier_transform&oldid=961707157#Uncertainty_principle

In precise terms, the uncertainty principle talks about the standard deviation of two measures.

We can visualize the uncertainty principle more intuitively by thinking of a wave function that is a real flat top bump function with a flat top in 1D. We can then change the width of the support, but when we do that, the top goes higher to keep probability equal to 1. The momentum is 0 everywhere, except in the edges of the support. Then:

Bibliography:

TODO is there any good intuitive argument or proof of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum?

Contains the full state of the quantum system.

This is in contrast to classical mechanics where e.g. the state of mechanical system is given by two real functions: position and speed.

The wave equation in position representation on the other hand encodes speed in "how fast does the complex phase spin around", and direction in "does it spin clockwise or counterclockwise", as described well at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)". Then once you understand that, it is more compact to just view those graphs with the phase color coded as in Video "Simulation of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (JavaScript Animation) by Coding Physics (2019)".