The full scripts presented in this post are available at these links: MATLAB, Python In the previous post we saw how the time-dependent Schrödinger equation allows us to calculate how quantum mechanical systems evolve with time, under the effect of the Hamiltonian operator, which describes the total energy of the system. In the case where […]

Collapse of the wave function. Sounds intense, in’t? What does it mean? That’s the topic of this post. When we discussed the second and third postulates of quantum mechanics, we saw that, for a given physical observable , we can only measure an eigenvalue of the operator associated with . We also saw with the […]

The full scripts presented in this post are available at these links: MATLAB, Python With the first postulate of quantum mechanics, we learnt that everything there is to know about a quantum system is encapsulated in the wave function . But so far, the wave function is sort of a black box and we still […]

This post presents the last of the six postulates of quantum mechanics. Up to now, we have seen how a quantum mechanical state is defined, what is the outcomes of measurements on such systems, and how measurements affect them. The sixth postulate determines how quantum mechanical system evolve in time; it defines the equation of […]

The full scripts presented in this post are available at these links: MATLAB, Python In the previous post, we saw that for any state , measuring the observable can only result in one of the eigenvalues of the Hermitian operator associated with . We concluded by asking what could be the probability of measuring one […]

The full scripts presented in this post are available at these links: MATLAB, Python To develop the framework of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, pioneer scientists had to question our knowledge about the world. They had to ask themselves what a measurement and an observer are, and how they interact. When Newton introduced […]

Hi reader, welcome to this post series on the postulates of quantum mechanics!  Have you ever followed classes on quantum mechanics? A common approach to presenting this fascinating topic is to first introduce the six postulates of quantum mechanics, one by one. Here, we intend to do something similar: each of the next six posts […]