Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 42
Copenhagen Interpretation
I cant imagine that an electron hops around like a flea. (Schrödinger)
• I don’t like it (quantum mechanics) and I’m sorry I ever had anything
to do with it. (Schrödinger)
• The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of
quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than
forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical
model. (Schrödinger)
• The soothing philosophy - or religion? - of Heisenberg-Bohr is so cleverly
concocted that for the present it offers the believers a soft resting
pillow from which they are not easliy chased away. Let us therefore let
them rest. (Einstein)
The Schrödinger equation developed by the 39 year old Austrian physicist
Erwin Schrödinger in a sequence of 4 articles in 1926, expresses a balance
of kinetic and potential energies of a set of interacting negatively charged
electrons and positively charged kernels in the form of a partial differential
equation. The potential energy has contribution from attractive and repulsive
forces. A solution of Schödinger’s equation is called a wave-function .
Schrödinger solved the equation for the one-electron problem of the Hydrogen
atom.
Formally the Schrödinger equation is a differential equation in 3N space
dimensions plus time, where N is the number of electrons and kernels, which
makes it impossible to solve exactly even for N rather small, and Nobel Laureate
Walter Kohn insists that for N > 100 − 1000 the wave-function is not
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