You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

passive_fist comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 06:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (307)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: passive_fist 05 August 2013 09:16:46AM 4 points [-]

This is pretty much correct, but to be more general and not just restrict yourself to the position basis, you can talk about the wavefunction in general, in terms of the eigenvector basis.

Two states 'strongly interact' if they share many of their high-amplitude eigenvectors. This is because eigenvectors evolve independently, and so if you have two states that do not share many eigenvectors, they will also evolve independently.

In the position basis, this winds up being much the same as having particles far from each other. In the momentum basis, it's less intuitive. You can have states with very similar representations in this basis but nevertheless very different eigenvector expansions.

Comment author: Emile 05 August 2013 09:33:15AM 0 points [-]

I must admit I have very little understanding of how eigenvectors fit in with QM. I'll have to read up more on that, thanks for pointing out holes in my knowledge (though in the domain of QM, there are a lot of holes).