I'm skeptical about the amount that measurement ought to be central to the theory - scientists seem to be attracted to this view for bad metaphysical reasons. But I don't really know.
Most wavefunctions are not an eigenstate of energy... only stationary states are. However, stationary states are usually the first thing you want to find when you're studying a new quantum system, since it's very easy to build any more complicated time-dependent state out of a superposition of the simpler stationary states.
Ah, that's useful to know. So there are in fact plenty of states that don't have a well-defined energy in this sense (where the energy is the eigenvalue). That's useful to know! This didn't seem to be mentioned in the wikipedia article about the Schrodinger equation.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-09-16 12:15 am (UTC)Most wavefunctions are not an eigenstate of energy... only stationary states are. However, stationary states are usually the first thing you want to find when you're studying a new quantum system, since it's very easy to build any more complicated time-dependent state out of a superposition of the simpler stationary states.
Ah, that's useful to know. So there are in fact plenty of states that don't have a well-defined energy in this sense (where the energy is the eigenvalue). That's useful to know! This didn't seem to be mentioned in the wikipedia article about the Schrodinger equation.