Schrödinger Against Particles and Quantum Jumps

Ta-Pei Cheng

Miguel Orszag, Rafael Ramı́rez

Nima Moshayedi

J. S. Bell

If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved. E. Schrödinger Introduction I have borrowed the title of a characteristic paper by Schrödinger (Schrödinger, 1952). In it he contrasts the smooth evolution of the Schrödinger wavefunction with the erratic behaviour of the picture by which the wavefunction is usually supplemented, or ‘interpreted’, in the minds of most physicists. He objects in particular to the notion of ‘stationary states’, and above all to ‘quantum jumping’ between those states. He regards these concepts as hangovers from the old Bohr quantum theory, of 1913, and entirely unmotivated by anything in the mathematics of the new theory of 1926. He would like to regard the wavefunction itself as the complete picture, and completely determined by the Schrödinger equation, and so evolving smoothly without ‘quantum jumps’. Nor would he have ‘particles’ in the picture. At an early stage, he had tried to replace ‘particles’ by wavepackets (Schrödinger, 1926). But wavepackets diffuse. And the paper of 1952 ends, rather lamely, with the admission that Schrödinger does not see how, for the present, to account for particle tracks in track chambers … nor, more generally, for the definiteness, the particularity, of the world of experience, as compared with the indefiniteness, the waviness, of the wavefunction. It is the problem that he had had (Schrödinger, 1935 a ) with his cat. He thought that she could not be both dead and alive.

Daniel R. Bes

James S. Bell

If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved. E. Schrödinger Introduction I have borrowed the title of a characteristic paper by Schrödinger (Schrödinger, 1952). In it he contrasts the smooth evolution of the Schrödinger wavefunction with the erratic behaviour of the picture by which the wavefunction is usually supplemented, or ‘interpreted’, in the minds of most physicists. He objects in particular to the notion of ‘stationary states’, and above all to ‘quantum jumping’ between those states. He regards these concepts as hangovers from the old Bohr quantum theory, of 1913, and entirely unmotivated by anything in the mathematics of the new theory of 1926. He would like to regard the wavefunction itself as the complete picture, and completely determined by the Schrödinger equation, and so evolving smoothly without ‘quantum jumps’. Nor would he have ‘particles’ in the picture. At an early stage, he had tried to replace ‘particles’ by wavepackets (Schrödinger, 1926). But wavepackets diffuse. And the paper of 1952 ends, rather lamely, with the admission that Schrödinger does not see how, for the present, to account for particle tracks in track chambers… nor, more generally, for the definiteness, the particularity, of the world of experience, as compared with the indefiniteness, the waviness, of the wavefunction. It is the problem that he had had (Schrödinger, 1935 a ) with his cat. He thought that she could not be both dead and alive.