Ten years ago I posted 2 blog posts
explaining the tragedy to have been caused by a dictate to physicists to confess to the Bohr-Heisenberg-Born so called Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics here referred to Standard Quantum Mechanics StdQM. Today on Good Friday it is time to reflect on repression of heretics.
The above posts tell the story how Schrödinger, the creator of the Schrödinger equation for the Hydrogen atom as the corner stone to the modern physics of atoms, was overpowered by Bohr assisted by Heisenberg and Born to accept that the microscopic mechanics of atoms is fundamentally different from the macroscopic mechanics of classical physics. In short, the dictate was to give up determinism in physical three space dimensions for non-determinism in high-dimensional abstract space. Schrödinger heavily objected but Bohr was mentally stronger and so Schrödinger was eliminated from the quantum mechanics taking power of modern physics into our days. Einstein joined with Schrödinger in critique of non-determinism, but was declared to be an old fool unable to grasp the subtleties of quantum mechanics.
Today is 100 years since Schrödinger formulated his equation for the Hydrogen atom with one electron with inspiration from Hamilton-Jacobi wave mechanics, which however did not lend itself in a natural way to atoms with many electrons. The generalisation was instead performed formally by adding a new 3d space dimension for each new electron into a Schrödinger equation in $3N$ space dimensions for an atom with $N$ electrons, an uncomputable equation without 3d physical meaning It was here Born stepped in to give it a statistical meaning which was adopted by Bohr with support of Heisenberg into StdQM as the dictate of modern physics.
A different generalisation of the Schrödinger equation for the Hydrogen atom is given by Real Quantum Mechanics RealQM as a form of classical continuum mechanics of elastic bodies in 3d. Electrons of RealQM occupy different regions of 3d space and carry like elastic bodies a form of strain energy measured by the gradient of electronic wave function/charge density, also referred as "kinetic energy" although no motion in space is involved. But Schrödinger missed this option maybe because he was not familiar with elasticity theory, and so modern physics was doomed to StdQM with all its complications.
Summary:
- Is StdQM a tragic mistake?
- Can RealQM replace StdQM as a realistic Schrödinger equation?
If an electron is a cloud, is it possible to tear it apart into disconnected components?
SvaraRaderaNo, that would be contradictory to the idea of an electron as a form of unit without self-interaction.
SvaraRaderaNo, that would be contradictory to the idea of an electron as a form of unit without self-interaction.
SvaraRaderaIt doesn't seem to contradict the idea to me. And is there anything in your equations that prevents this? (Time-dependent version)
SvaraRaderaIt contradicts lack of Coulombic self-repulsion of an electron. If you could rip it apart then it would start to interact with itself like two distinct charges.
SvaraRaderaThere is then the question of what topological shapes the support of the wave function of an electron is allowed to have:
SvaraRadera- ball is ok
- sphere is ok
- (...)
- two balls is not ok