Physics Lecture

Equations straggle across the blackboards
dance and shimmer
spill understanding and enlightenment
making the strange world of quantum
less of a confusement
less of a set of contradictory statements.
Now you see it now you don’t.
Was Schrödinger’s cat truly there/not there?
The equations say Yes
as they are folded into Hilbert space
and all becomes obvious.
Even to our post party undergraduate brains.

……remembering back to University………

11 thoughts on “Physics Lecture”

I love this, Kim. One of my favorite topics. :)

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Mine too, The Quantum Physics course was the toughest one of my Degree, until one day, it all made sense –just in time for the exam!

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E.E. Nobbs says:

January 22, 2018 at 9:22 pm

Thanks, Kim! You did a great job explaining. I’m glad I asked :-)

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I checked Wikipedia re “Hilbert space” but got befuddled by the equations. How would you define it? :-)

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The Cheesesellers Wife says:

January 22, 2018 at 2:01 pm

I’ll try!

Quantum Mechanics describes the interactions of atomic and subatomic particles at the microscopic level. These particles are also waves (there are plenty of simple experiments that show this with light for example). So they are described mathematically by something called a wave function which is generally complex. The function completely defines the dynamical state of the system being considered, and contrary to classical physics, the dynamical variables of the system such as momentum and position, cannot in general be defined at each instant with infinite precision. The maths involved in calculating the motions of quantum particles is made so much easier by transforming the equations into Hilbert Space. It is an multidimensional abstract vector space that we can use to perform quantum mechanical calculations. It is not a physically real space.

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Shortly after my son began at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, he called me and spent about a half hour explaining how calculus explained the world in perfect description. He is now a physicist, as is his wife. I can spell calculus and physics.

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