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Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks

The Strange World of the Quantum

P. C. W. Davies, J. R. Brown

Published Jan 1, 1974• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The word ‘quantum’ means ‘a quantity’ or ‘a discrete amount’. On an everyday scale we are accustomed to the idea that the properties of an object such as its size, weight, colour, temperature, surface area, and motion are all qualities which can vary from one object to another in a smooth and continuous way. Apples, for example, come in all manner of shapes, sizes and colours without any noticeable gradations in between. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

DOI
10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7_4

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The word ‘quantum’ means ‘a quantity’ or ‘a discrete amount’. On an everyday scale we are accustomed to the idea that the properties of an object such as its size, weight, colour, temperature, surface area, and motion are all qualities which can vary from one object to another in a smooth and continuous way. Apples, for example, come in all manner of shapes, sizes and colours without any noticeable gradations in between. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The fundamental laws of Nature that govern the physics of atoms, elementary particles, light quanta, and everything else that is small and light, have been found to fit in one grandiose framework called Quantum Mechanics. The internal logic of this framework appears to be counter intuitive and mysterious, while extremely coherent and effective. In this general introduction the author explains why he feels the need for expressing his views on how to understand these facts, even if many known scientists have already given extensive reviews of numerous ideas and approaches. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The word “quantum” means “how much”, “quantity”, “share”, “portion”, and so on. The language of quantum physics is peculiar although in essence it is not different from a conventional language. There are few people nowadays who do not accept the reality of atoms as they do, say, the motion of the Earth around the Sun. “The Universe is made up, in reality, of nothing but atoms and the void; all the rest exists only in the mind. After twenty centuries of oblivion the idea of atoms was resurrected by the French philosopher and sage Pierre Gassendi. The amplitude of a wave is its maximum height. The definitions of the wavelength and velocity are clear from the drawing. In the closing years of the last century, Max Planck, like many before him, was looking for a universal formula for the spectral function of an absolutely black body.
Classical theories starting with continuous degrees of freedom will typically generate bosonic quantum objects; fermionic quantum objects in turn, arise when a classical system contains discrete degrees of freedom—typically: flip-flops. Here, we explain how anti-commuting operators enter the scene, and illustrate the situation using an elegant model: the idealized notion of a ‘neutrino’. What do neutrinos have in common with infinite, at sheets, and where does spin 12\frac{1}{2}21​ come from? The associated mathematical tool kit is quite delicate. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
According to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM), no meaning can be assigned to the statement that a particle has a precise value of any one of the variables describing its physical propertes before having interacted with a suitable measuring instrument. On the other hand, it is well known that QM tends to classical statistical mechanics (CSM) when a suitable classical limit is performed. One may ask therefore how is it that in this limit, the statement, meaningless in QM, that a given variable has always a precise value independently of having been measured, gradually becomes meaningful. In other words, one may ask how can it be that QM, which is a theory describing the intrinsically probabilistic properties of a quantum object, becomes a statistical theory describing a probabilistic knowledge of intrinsically well determined properties of classical objects.