#physicsposting

like yeah. hang on to hope guys. hang on to the hope that the one thing you need to solve physics is there and real. i wish you luck searching inside black holes and cooling metal pipes to stupidly cold degrees.

Oh Hell yea!

Quantum mechanics is quite a different field when compared to classical physics - many things, especially related to measurements of properties, work very differently from the way we are used to seeing the world. Like, if you go to the doctor and get your height and weight measured, the order shouldn't matter. In a quantum setting, one of these measurements might change the outcome of the other.

As a physicist you (probably) know about the uncertainty principle. This states that you cannot measure both position and momentum with infinite precision. Rather, the more precise you measure one of them, the less precise you will know the other. Therefore, you always have a bit of uncertainty spread out over the two properties. In fact, there are lots of properties that cannot be measured simultaneously this way!

The theorem I did my thesis on adds one more layer on top of this. We know that it is sometimes impossible to precisely measure two things at the same time, but can we always measure one variable?

It turns out that the answer is no. Sometimes, if you have one single property of a system that you would like to measure, it still has an uncertainty relationship. Not to a different variable, but to the very laws of nature! The WAY-theorem is a result from 1960 that tells us that a bounded observable (= thing that can be measured) cannot be precisely measured if it interacts with the laws of nature in a certain way.

However, not all observables are bounded. One example of an unbounded observable is energy: if you have an object with a certain amount of it, you can theoretically always find or crate a state with more. The mathematical techniques used in the 1960 paper could not be generalised to this unbounded case, though.

Friend of mine was like "the logarithmic potential well is so much cooler than the 1/r potential well that we have to live with" (if we lived in 2d we'd use a logarithmic potential well instead, this was basically just a lament about how our 3d world is boring in this one hyperniche way)

So i spent some time writing out the whole Schrodinger Equation for the 2d logarithmic well. I'm sure someone has already solved this (it's an extremely natural case to think about, it's not particularly unreasonable to expect someone to come across this on their own) but i miiight still take a crack at it later.

I crafted this tiny wire model back in 2013. It's built of copper wire.

this shape has a very interesting handling - it wobbles, it's still merely stable, but it's still very flexible.

Back in 2013 this was how I imagined an elementary particle's coiled 'string' (partially relates to string theory).

Now look at the wobbly model when shaken: