User talk:Chetvorno/work1

"are only approximations" -- It's a little more subtle than that, but I'm not sure I could put it any better than you have. A good example of what actually happens can be seen by looking at the "orbits" of electrons. Near the nucleus they are spaced out, and as you get farther and farther from the nucleus they get closer and closer together until you can't see any gap. At that point the change from orbit to orbit amounts to the continuous change from point to point that classical physics expects, and from that point the classical physics "picture" is the same as the QM picture.

Let's think about the things that were driving these guys to distraction. It's clear that Heisenberg was really bugged by Mother Nature's wayward ways, but even at the beginning people were deeply puzzled, and they should have been. Why don't electrons spiral down into the nucleus? It sort of makes sense that if electrons can be in different orbits then they could vibrate at different frequencies, and we are definitely seeing a constant and characteristic series of frequencies coming out of light produced by hydrogen, helium, neon... every element. But why? Then there turns out to be a simple math formula. Why? Why? Why? It's a wonder they didn't all become Zen Buddhists. They had koans coming at them out of the neon signs in shop windows.

One of the things that is really critical about QM is that it forces us to give up our old mental furniture and replace it with something we've never seen before. That is very difficult to do. P0M (talk) 07:40, 30 May 2009 (UTC)