Schrodinger’s Equation, de Broglie Wavelength, and Cloud Computing

January 4th is the anniversary of the death of Erwin Schrodinger. Schrodinger and Heisenberg are considered the “fathers” of quantum mechanics. As quantum computing is based on quantum mechanics principles, by transitivity, they are the “fathers” of quantum computing, as well.

The Schrodinger equation plays the role of Newton’s second law and the law of energy conservation in classical mechanics — i.e., it predicts the future evolution of a dynamic system. It is a wave equation which predicts analytically and precisely the probability of events or outcome. The detailed outcome is not strictly determined, but given a large number of events, the Schrodinger equation will predict the distribution of results.

The kinetic and potential energies are transformed into a Hamiltonian operator which acts upon the wave function to generate the evolution of the wave function in time and space. The Schrodinger equation calculates the quantified energies of the system and provides the shape of the wave function so that other properties may be calculated. In Newtonian mechanics the events describing planetary orbits are definite, in quantum mechanics they become probability.

Schrödinger devoted much of his later life to formulating philosophical objections to the generally accepted interpretation of the theory that he had done so much to create. His most famous objection was the 1935 thought experiment known as Schrodinger’s cat.

A cat is locked in a box with a small amount of a radioactive substance such that after one hour there is an equal probability of one atom either decaying or not decaying. If the atom decays, a device smashes a vial of poisonous gas, killing the cat. However, until the box is opened and the atom’s wave function collapses, the atom’s wave function is in a superposition of two states: decay and non-decay. Thus, the cat is in a superposition of two states: alive and dead. Schrödinger thought this outcome “quite ridiculous,” and when and how the fate of the cat is determined has been a subject of much debate among physicists.

Schrodinger was inspired by Louis de Broglie who showed that particles of matter have a dual nature and in some situations act like waves.

For instance, we can easily calculate the wavelength of a moving baseball or an electron. The wave properties of the electron are more accentuated that those of a baseball.

I was wondering if the de Broglie wavelength and Schrodinger equation can have any applicability in cloud computing correlated to data and execution units (virtual machines and containers). Intuitively the wave aspect of containers should be more relevant than that of virtual machines.

Question: What is de Broglie wavelength of a container or virtual machine encapsulating the same application and running on the same compute?

Have fun!