295 research outputs found
Functional Classical Mechanics and Rational Numbers
The notion of microscopic state of the system at a given moment of time as a
point in the phase space as well as a notion of trajectory is widely used in
classical mechanics. However, it does not have an immediate physical meaning,
since arbitrary real numbers are unobservable. This notion leads to the known
paradoxes, such as the irreversibility problem. A "functional" formulation of
classical mechanics is suggested. The physical meaning is attached in this
formulation not to an individual trajectory but only to a "beam" of
trajectories, or the distribution function on phase space. The fundamental
equation of the microscopic dynamics in the functional approach is not the
Newton equation but the Liouville equation for the distribution function of the
single particle. The Newton equation in this approach appears as an approximate
equation describing the dynamics of the average values and there are
corrections to the Newton trajectories. We give a construction of probability
density function starting from the directly observable quantities, i.e., the
results of measurements, which are rational numbers.Comment: 8 page
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