Solving the Schrodinger equation with the time-independent Schrödinger equation by
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Before reading any further, you must understand heat equation solution with Fourier series, which uses separation of variables.
Once that example is clear, we see that the exact same separation of variables can be done to the Schrödinger equation. If we name the constant of the separation of variables for energy, we get:
- a time-only part that does not depend on space and does not depend on the Hamiltonian at all. The solution for this part is therefore always the same exponentials for any problem, and this part is therefore "boring":
- a space-only part that does not depend on time, bud does depend on the Hamiltonian:Since this is the only non-trivial part, unlike the time part which is trivial, this spacial part is just called "the time-independent Schrodinger equation".Note that the here is not the same as the in the time-dependent Schrodinger equation of course, as that psi is the result of the multiplication of the time and space parts. This is a bit of imprecise terminology, but hey, physics.
Because the time part of the equation is always the same and always trivial to solve, all we have to do to actually solve the Schrodinger equation is to solve the time independent one, and then we can construct the full solution trivially.
Once we've solved the time-independent part for each possible , we can construct a solution exactly as we did in heat equation solution with Fourier series: we make a weighted sum over all possible to match the initial condition, which is analogous to the Fourier series in the case of the heat equation to reach a final full solution:
- if there are only discretely many possible values of , each possible energy . we proceed and this is a solution by selecting such that at time we match the initial condition:A finite spectrum shows up in many incredibly important cases:Equation 3.Solution of the Schrodinger equation in terms of the time-independent and time dependent parts.
- if there are infinitely many values of E, we do something analogous but with an integral instead of a sum. This is called the continuous spectrum. One notable
The fact that this approximation of the initial condition is always possible from is mathematically proven by some version of the spectral theorem based on the fact that The Schrodinger equation Hamiltonian has to be Hermitian and therefore behaves nicely.
It is interesting to note that solving the time-independent Schrodinger equation can also be seen exactly as an eigenvalue equation where:The only difference from usual matrix eigenvectors is that we are now dealing with an infinite dimensional vector space.
- the Hamiltonian is a linear operator
- the value of the energy
E
is an eigenvalue
Furthermore:
- we immediately see from the equation that the time-independent solutions are states of deterministic energy because the energy is an eigenvalue of the Hamiltonian operator
- by looking at Equation 3. "Solution of the Schrodinger equation in terms of the time-independent and time dependent parts", it is obvious that if we take an energy measurement, the probability of each result never changes with time, because it is only multiplied by a constant
Ciro Santilli was touched by this, and then watched several other documentaries by Curtis.
Notably the part of the governments have lost all power to companies, and can't do anything meaningful anymore to actually represent the people, because globalization reduces the power of governments.
As seen from explicit scalar form of the Maxwell's equations, this expands to 8 equations, so the question arises if the system is over-determined because it only has 6 functions to be determined.
As explained on the Wikipedia page however, this is not the case, because if the first two equations hold for the initial condition, then the othe six equations imply that they also hold for all time, so they can be essentially omitted.
It is also worth noting that the first two equations don't involve time derivatives. Therefore, they can be seen as spacial constraints.
TODO: the electric field and magnetic field can be expressed in terms of the electric potential and magnetic vector potential. So then we only need 4 variables?
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nutrient&oldid=1075972831#Essential gives somewhat of an overview:
Deterministic, but non-local.
You need a secondary password that when used leads to an empty inbox with a setting set where message are deleted after 2 days.
This way, if the attacker sends a test email, it will still show up, but being empty is also plausible.
Ciro Santilli believes that the Donald Trump bans were extremely unfair, and highlight the need for government to ensure greater freedom of speech in social media, more information at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/unjust-social-media-censorship-in-the-west, related: globalization reduces the power of governments.
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