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Quantum Zen

A Poem by Alvin Delaphes, Ph. D. Physics
and his attached-at-the-ribs-twin brother, Myron, Ph. D. Astronomy

I

In my lonely nine-room house,
on a full moon,
after a full meal, a full metal jacket, and a reading of the full gospel,
when Myron is long asleep,
I light up my stogie,
have a shot of Old Grandad,
put on my velvet bathrobe,
and settle back
with a bit of quantum babble,
for amusement, yes,
but for
quickening the intellectual libido,
and remembering Muffy, my cat half-dead,
half alive
that Schrodinger disposed
in an irreversible polytope,
in his Bell Jar experiment in 1931.

II

Here the music begins:
Schrödinger's great insight, late in 1925,
was to express the phase of a plane wave
as a complex phase factor:
and to realize that since
then
and similarly since:
and hence:
so that, again for a plane wave, he got:
And by inserting these expressions into the
Newtonian formula for a particle with total energy
E, mass m moving in a potential

V:

(simply the sum of the kinetic energy and potential energy; the plane wave model assumed V = 0)
he got his famed equation for a single particle in the 3-dimensional case in the presence of a potential:

III

And here enter the Three Buddhas
to lift my three souls into the clear light


Calvin Bainbridge

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