Copasetic Flow

Here are a few quick notes on what might become my next history of physics presentation.  Does anyone know more about the history of Dr. Senitzky and coherent states? I'm still studyinng for my quantum II pre-midterm this week.  Looking for more material on quantum operators, I performed a search for quantum operators in the American Jouranl of Physics which led to an article about the harmonic oscillator wave packet .  Since harmonic oscillators are one of the favorite subjects in both of my quantum classes, I and II, I read on.  The author, Saul Epstein of the University of Nebraska, mentioned that while several authors covered the Gaussian wave packet as an example of a wave function that will not change shape in a harmonic oscillator potential well,   I. R. Senitzky [2] (picture 1) had shown using the Schrodinger formalism that there were actually an infinite number of such non-shape changing packet wave functions. Switching over to Dr. Seni...

What I thought would  be  a boring post on EM boundary conditions a few days ago has turned into something interesting.  Jonah Miller replied back to the post and made a comment that ultimately led to the Abraham-Minkowski controversy on how to interpret the momentum of a photon in a piece of material.  Apparently this debate has progressed fora little bit over 100 y ears with the form of the momentum equation in a material proposed by Max Abraham apparently conflicting with the one proposed by Hermann Minkowski of Minkowski metric fame where n is the index of refraction for the material, h is Planck's constant, nu is the frequency of the light, and c is the speed of light. The controversy even led to people studying whether or not the discrepancy might be used as the basis for a reactionless drive with the Air Force and NASA purportedly getting in on the game according to Wikipedia. It turns out  that the answer in all likelihood is that everyo...