The Quantum Times

  Quantum Operators: What are they? Frank Lin If you've been learning a bit about the actual physics behind quantum physics, you've likely come across these things called operators. When I was first starting out in quantum mechanics, I was perplexed by the abstractness of them. All explanations of what an "operator" really was just didn't make sense to me, and those explanations often contradicted themselves. I think it is fair to say that operators are generally not explained well--even by textbooks and professionals. The goal of this blogpost is to make you understand what a quantum operator really is. An Operator is something that acts on an eigenfunction and outputs the associated eigenvalue multiplied by the same eigenfunction. What a mouthful! Let's break this statement into parts. We have 3 complex words: Eigenfunction, eigenvalue, and operator. To know what an operator is we need to know what an eigenfunction and eigenvalue is. To know what those are,

  The Real Nature of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle By Frank Lin   The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has been a common example of the “mysticism” of quantum mechanics. It tells you that if you know the position of a particle, then you can’t know where it’s going. It may seem bizarre, but hey that’s just quantum for ya, where everyday logic breaks down! In fact, it even allows for brief violations of conservation of energy! Particles at the quantum scale don’t even have real positions or momentum. How cool is that? Well, there’s one problem. Everything that I just said is false. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not describe these things at all, and while what I said is the popular depiction of the principle, the popular depiction of the principle has been flawed over the decades. Every single “pop-science” video on the HUP (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) I’ve seen online have all been false. This leads to 2 puzzling questions. 1. What’s the right interpretation of t