{"id":5591,"date":"2011-05-18T11:07:46","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T11:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/18\/idle-historical-question-why-p\/"},"modified":"2011-05-18T11:07:46","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T11:07:46","slug":"idle-historical-question-why-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/18\/idle-historical-question-why-p\/","title":{"rendered":"Idle Historical Question: Why p?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s lecture topic was position-space and momentum-space representations of state vectors in quantum mechanics, which once again brought up one of the eternal questions in physics:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Why do we use the symbol <i>p<\/i> to represent momentum?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I did Google this, but none of the answers looked all that authoritative. And, anyway, I&#8217;m sure that the readers of this blog can come up with fanciful speculations that would be far more interesting than the real answer. So, have at it.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>(I&#8217;m too overextended and exhausted to post anything more substantive right now; maybe later this afternoon.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s lecture topic was position-space and momentum-space representations of state vectors in quantum mechanics, which once again brought up one of the eternal questions in physics: Why do we use the symbol p to represent momentum? I did Google this, but none of the answers looked all that authoritative. And, anyway, I&#8217;m sure that the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/18\/idle-historical-question-why-p\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Idle Historical Question: Why p?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history_of_science","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}