Conservation of Energy in Classical Mechanics and Its Lack from the Point of View of Quantum Theory

Abstract

It is pointed out that the property of a constant energy characteristic for the circular motions of macroscopic bodies in classical mechanics does not hold when the quantum conditions for the motion are applied. This is so because any macroscopic body—lo-cated in a high-energy quantum state—is in practice forced to change this state to a state having a lower energy. The rate of the energy decrease is usually extremely small which makes its effect uneasy to detect in course of the observations, or experiments. The energy of the harmonic oscillator is thoroughly examined as an example. Here our point is that not only the energy, but also the oscillator amplitude which depends on energy, are changing with time. In result, no constant positions of the turning points of the oscillator can be specified; consequently the well-known variational procedure concerning the calculation of the action function and its properties cannot be applied.