William Wootters - 'A Curious Correspondence' (Physics Colloquium 2018)

“A curious correspondence connecting quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, and statistical mechanics”

Dr. William Wootters, Williams College

The probabilities physicists use to describe thermal equilibrium are normally derived via a general counting argument, which can be found in almost any textbook on statistical mechanics. This talk shows how, for certain very simple quantum systems, those same probabilities can be obtained, at least for high temperature, just by insisting on a specific kind of agreement between quantum physics and classical physics.