What is the Wave Function of a Swinging Pendulum?
Consider a macroscopic simple harmonic oscillator, and to keep things simple assume there are no interactions with the rest of the universe. We know how to describe the motion using classical mechanics: for a given initial position and momentum, classical mechanics correctly predicts the future path, as confirmed by experiments with real (admittedly not perfect) systems. But from the Hamiltonian we could also write down Schrdingers equation, and from that predict the future behavior of the system. Since we already know the answer from classical mechanics and experiment, quantum mechanics must give us the same result in the limiting case of a large system. It is a worthwhile exercise to see just how this happens. Evidently, we cannot simply follow the classical method of specifying the initial position and momentumthe uncertainty principle wont allow it. What we can do, though, is to take an initial state in which the position and momentum are specified as precisely as possible. Such a
