Re: Heisenberg uncertainty principle for macroscopic objects

["P. O. Johnson" <pojhome@FLASH.NET>]

Oh Leigh, now you've done it. My lawyer daughter tells me never to ask a
question unless I know the answer. When I started reading your ping pong
question, I was already looking forward to your (analytical, not empirical)
answer. You've left me hanging.

poj
Collin County College

P.S. How did ping pong get its name? The sound of the game is more like ping
pong pronounced backwards: gnop gnip.

----- Original Message -----
From: Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Friday, December 17, 1999 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: Heisenberg uncertainty principle for macroscopic objects


> George Gamow talked about the incredibly small probability of a car
> tunneling into a garage. I believe the probability is incredibly
> small, meaning it *is* nonzero *and* I won't believe anyone's number
> for it as being believable within an order of magnitude - of its
> order of magnitude! We aren't yet wrong, Margaret.
>
> Paul's icepick problem is easy. My roommate at Cal came home with a
> much harder variant. His prof asked him what the expectation value
> was for the number of times an ideal ping pong ball could be bounced
> from a similar fixed ball when dropped optimally from an initial
> vertical separation of ten radii. I didn't solve the problem for him
> (I hadn't had QM at that time) so we did the experiment and
> concluded the answer was less than two. I did the (messy) calculation
> a year later, but I forget what I got.
>
> Back to grading papers.
>
> Leigh