vanesch
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
- 5,109
- 20
ZapperZ said:A QM description of a tennis ball is not and cannot be made "simple". You are just applying a set of rules to where it was never meant to be applied. You might as well say "OK, I am now moving greater than c at a time 20 million years BEFORE the Big Bang. What do I see?" That is a mind game too, but it doesn't mean it has any reasonable answer.
There's a difference: the last proposition is totally meaningless, even in principle, but I object to your "cannot be made simple".
After all, when you use a quantum description of, say, a Calcium atom, then you take it that the nucleus is a single point particle, with just an x, y, z continuous position degrees of freedom, and eventually some discrete spin degrees of freedom.
Now, any nuclear physicist will tell you that that is a rather naive view of a nucleus, and that you have a complicated system in there, with complicated interactions between neutrons, protons and pions. And if you turn to a particle physicist, he will tell you that a proton made up of 3 quarks is a rather naive model, and that you have miriads of degrees of freedom in there, with gluons, a sea of virtual quarks and all that.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of atomic physics, it is sufficient to put all these internal degrees of freedom under the carpet, and just stick to some overall kinetical degrees of freedom: the position of the center of mass, and eventually a spin degree of freedom.
So I don't see why I'm not entitled to do the same to the object "tennisball". I abstract away its internal degrees of freedom (the atoms, the electrons, whatever), and I just keep some overall kinetical degrees of freedom: the position of its center of mass, and eventually a spin degree of freedom (which can take here very high values, to start looking like a classically spinning object).
I know that there is a difference with the nucleus case: we could say that we don't need the nuclear degrees of freedom because essentially only the ground state matters in the energy range we're exploring in atomic physics, because nuclear exitations are on much higher energy levels
So we limit ourselves to the "neighbourhood" of the nuclear grond state in the Hilbert space that does describe the nuclear degrees of freedom.
You could correctly argue that this is NOT the case for the ball-wall interaction, which could eventually be considered to be of the same order of magnitude as the exitations of the internal degrees of freedom. Granted. I already alluded to this before. So we're making errors here: we're excluding degrees of freedom which may have their say. In other words, we're making a very rough approximation... But that was granted!
Last edited: