Friday, May 24, 2013

Thoughts I have during class, 2

After an introduction to the uncertainty principle, and a clarification that some of the common examples for it are not quite true:

"Huh, that makes a lot more sense now. It's not that position and momentum are there but we can't measure them because of quantum magic. Position and the wave number k are Fourier conjugate variables, and by De Broglie's postulates k equals momentum divided by h-bar, so of course if one is highly focused the other is very spread out, and in the limit you have one as a Dirac delta and the other as a wave over all space. I wonder why science popularizers don't discuss it this way, it's not that complicated...


...oh, right, Fourier transforms."