London 2012 vowed to be the cleanest Olympics ever, with more
than 6,000 tests on athletes for performance enhancing drugs.
But when an athlete does fail a drug test can we really conclude
that they are cheating? John Haigh does the maths. In the 1920s
the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger came up with what has
become the central equation of quantum mechanics. It tells you
all there is to know about a quantum physical system and it also
predicts famous quantum weirdnesses such as superposition and
quantum entanglement. In this, the first article of a three-part
series, we introduce Schrödinger's equation and put it in its
historical context. In the previous article we introduced
Schrödinger's equation and its solution, the wave function,
which contains all the information there is to know about a
quantum system. Now it's time to see the equation in action,
using a very simple physical system as an example. We'll also
look at another weird phenomenon called quantum tunneling. In
our article Mapping the meda