Talk:Quantum mechanics
From Conservapedia
I have reinstated the change that had been made by Ssandoval, regarding the removal of "first order kinetics". It's true that he was an obvious vandal in other pages (yes, I looked around). It's also true that calling it an "idiotic implication" was excessive, and that his next "sentence" had no verb and contained a reference to a "negative amount" that I can't figure out. However, the chemical concept of "first order kinetics" isn't applicable here. Not idiotic, but wrong nonetheless. First order kinetics refers to a reaction rate per unit volume being proportional to the concentration of the reactants. In radioactivity the rate depends only on the amount of material. The exponential decay nevertheless follows.
Please look before reverting. CScience 14:25, 7 June 2007 (EDT)
I deleted the jargon comment, although I do agree that it is jargon, and the comment is duly noted. Again, I wish to emphasize that the subject of quantum mechanics is inherently a college-level subject, and the language I used should be accessible to a student with a college level understanding of calculus and linear algebra. --Mathoreilly 22:10, 1 July 2008 (EDT)
Let's not undo things hastily without discussing them first. There were some good things there. Why do you want to remove them?--Lemonpeel 15:00, 8 July 2008 (EDT)
- I'm no genius, but it all made sense to me....JPohl 15:46, 8 July 2008 (EDT)
- The postulates section could maybe have some preface or qualifying sentences to make it a bit easier for people without a background in physics to understand, but I could understand the article just fine as it was. Even Richard Feynman said that nobody truly understood quantum mechanics; however just because a concept is confusing, counterintuitive, or requires some previous knowledge to be explained, does not mean it should removed or simplified. Fantasia 16:18, 8 July 2008 (EDT)
I must take issue with the sentence: as a result of the wave nature of an electron, the position of the electron can never precisely be known. First of all, the more correct statement is that the position and momentum of an electron can never both be known with arbitrary precision. And this has nothing to do with the fact that an electron behaves like a wave. Rather, it results from the fact that the position and momentum operators do not commute with each other. For an example at the other end of the spectrum, the energy and spin-z operators DO commute with each other, and for this reason one can indeed simultaneously know the energy and spin of an electron.--Lemonpeel 19:52, 19 August 2008 (EDT)
- Yes, thank you for clarifying the point that the position and momentum of an electron can never both be known with arbitrary precision. This has been poorly stated in many places, and is really misleading. It's hard enough to understand physics; let's not make it any harder. --Ed Poor Talk 20:34, 19 August 2008 (EDT)
