https://doi.org/10.1140/epjh/s13129-023-00052-5
Regular Article
R. Fürth’s 1933 paper “On certain relations between classical statistics and quantum mechanics” [“Über einige Beziehungen zwischen klassischer Statistik und Quantenmechanik”, Zeitschrift für Physik, 81 143–162]
1
Santa Marinella Research Institute, 00058, Santa Marinella, Italy
2
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 68, 00014, Helsinki, Finland
b
paolo.muratoreginanneschi@helsinki.fi
Received:
2
September
2022
Accepted:
15
March
2023
Published online:
15
May
2023
We present a translation of the 1933 paper by R. Fürth in which a profound analogy between quantum fluctuations and Brownian motion is pointed out. Fürth highlights the existence of uncertainty relations involving the variance of a statistically conserved quantity of a non-equilibrium thermodynamic indicator and the variance of the corresponding current velocity. The phenomenon is entirely classical and traces back to the effect of a fluctuating environment on a measured system. In some sense, Fürth’s paper also opened the way to the stochastic methods of quantization developed almost 30 years later by Edward Nelson and others.
© The Author(s) 2023
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