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Quantum Chaos and Semiclassical Mechanics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Robert Batterman
Robert Batterman*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

As is weil known there has been an explosion of interest in classical dynarnics resulting from the relatively recent “discovery” that classical deterministic systems can be chaotic or in some sense random. Actually, their complexity had already been weil appreciated by Poincare in 1892 (MacKay, R. S. and Meiss, J. D. (1987), p. 7). Much interesting work is currently being done on classical chaos in both physics and philosophy. However, in the last fifteen years or so, the interest of some physicists has turned to the possibility that chaos, or chaotic behavior can be found in quantum mechanics as weil. Unfortunately, things are much less clear cut in the quantum case than in the classical. In fact, there is very little agreement about whether chaos in quantum mechanics even exists. In part this is because there is apparently no generally accepted definition of what chaos in quantum mechanics could be.

Type
Part II: Chaos Theory
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1992 , 1993 , pp. 50 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

For helpful comments and discussions on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank Roger Jones, Jim Joyce, Ron Laymon, Joe Mendola, and Mark Wilson. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SBE-9211983.

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