- #1
asimov42
- 377
- 4
Hi all - forgive me, I'd asked a series of questions in a previous post that was deemed to be circular, but I still didn't obtain a satisfactory answer to the question I was asking. In this post, I'm going to try to be very careful to use terms that are at least less 'misplaced', per se.
Consider the hydrogen atom, a bound state involving a proton and an electron - the overall atom satisfies the relativistic energy-momentum relation (I've carefully avoided using the words 'on shell' here)... yet, the individual components do not, which would seem to violate conservation of energy, at least naively. So, the question is, essentially, why is this the case?
The previous thread suggested not paying attention to the energy-momentum relation for bound states, but this absolutely seems fundamental to QFT, and so hard to ignore. Only observable states satisfy the energy-momentum relation, so it seems very odd that you assemble a set of constituents that ultimately don't and somehow end up with a result that does... simply ignoring the idea of the energy-momentum relation for bound states (as suggested) doesn't make the problem of understanding go away.
Consider the hydrogen atom, a bound state involving a proton and an electron - the overall atom satisfies the relativistic energy-momentum relation (I've carefully avoided using the words 'on shell' here)... yet, the individual components do not, which would seem to violate conservation of energy, at least naively. So, the question is, essentially, why is this the case?
The previous thread suggested not paying attention to the energy-momentum relation for bound states, but this absolutely seems fundamental to QFT, and so hard to ignore. Only observable states satisfy the energy-momentum relation, so it seems very odd that you assemble a set of constituents that ultimately don't and somehow end up with a result that does... simply ignoring the idea of the energy-momentum relation for bound states (as suggested) doesn't make the problem of understanding go away.