Quantum-Mechanical Aspects of the L. Pauling's Resonance Theory

Volodymyr Bezverkhniy, Vitaliy Bezverkhniy

Volodymyr Bezverkhniy, Vitaliy Bezverkhniy

Claudio Fernández, Rolando Rebolledo

K. Dechoum, H. M. França, Coraci Pereira Malta

Jonathan Tennyson

In 1929 Paul Dirac pronounced that "the underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory for a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are...completely known". While the fundamental aspects of non-relativistic quantum mechanics have remained essentially unchanged ever since, physics and chemistry have been driven largely by experiment. Dirac had the answer to that too. To his comment he added a rider: "The difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble."

Jonathan Allday

Amplitudes play a key role in quantum mechanics, as they are the link between theory and experiment. Theorists use quantum mechanics to calculate the amplitudes for various situations, and then experimenters set up appropriate apparatus and take measurements to check the theoretical conclusions. The idea that states can be expanded over a suitable basis is a very important aspect of quantum theory. This is how, in part, quantum theory reflects the contextual nature of quantum reality, that is, that the behaviour of a system is influenced by the experimental context. Every quantum state can be expanded in various ways, depending on what sort of experiment is involved. The first person to introduce symbols such as |φ〉 for quantum states was the celebrated English physicist, Paul Dirac. Dirac notation has become the standard alphabet for working in quantum theory.