A Serious Man's standard deviation

As you know, an average or mean value for a set of measurements is found by adding up all the measured values and dividing by the number of measurements.  The “People Aren’t Perfect” lab handout shows how it’s done, but it doesn’t show a pretty cool shorthand symbol that can be used instead of writing out the sum.  That symbol is the Greek capital letter sigma Σ. You replace the written-out addition with cap sigma and an index (usually i) that goes from 1 to N, like so:

<t> = (t₁ + t₂ + t₃ + … + t_N )/N

 =  Σ t_i /N,   from i= 1 to N.

Unlike the lab handout, I'm not going to use a symbol for the "deviation" because I'm going to square it and then do the multiplication of each term.  So here it is, unsquared:

Deviation of each value from the average = t_i - <t>.

Now, if you add up all the deviations you get zero, because the below-the-average deviations are negative numbers, and they cancel the above-the-average deviations.  So you can’t find a useful “average deviation” by adding up the deviations and dividing by N. 

But we still want to have a way of knowing how the measured values are dispersed around the average value: Widely dispersed or narrowly dispersed?  That’s how the “standard deviation” came to be defined.  What's called the sample standard deviation, as used in the lab handout, is found by squaring each deviation, then adding up all these squared deviations and dividing by N-1, and then taking the square root. The N-1 comes about because we are considering a "sample" rather than the entire "population." Look it up for yourself if you want.  It's kind of interesting.  Pollsters can only reasonably poll a sample of the entire population of voters, for example, and using  N-1 is supposed to make the sample standard deviation more closely approximate what the population standard deviation would be if you actually calculated it. 

Here we go with the squaring of the deviation:

                         (t_i - <t>)²  =  (t_i - <t>)( t_i - <t>) 

                                          =  t_i² -  <t> t_i  -  t_i <t> +  <t><t>

                                          =  t_i² - 2<t> t_i  + <t>²  .

Now, as Professor Larry Gopnick says when describing Schrödinger’s Cat to his class, “You following this?  So…okay…this part is exciting.”  Remember we need to sum these squared deviations, then divide by N-1, then take the square root, to get the standard deviation.  Symbolically, before taking the square root, it looks like this

                             Σ (t_i² - 2<t> t_i  + <t>² )/(N-1),

which is just a different way of writing the expression that appears under the square root symbol in the equation for Δt in the People Aren't Perfect lab discussion. 

Next, distribute the (N-1) factor to each term, like so

                        Σ [t_i²/(N-1) - 2<t> t_i/(N-1) + <t>²/(N-1)],

then do the same with the summation operator Σ

                        Σ t_i²/(N-1) - Σ 2<t> t_i/(N-1) + Σ <t>²/(N-1).

And now I've gotten myself in trouble, but like a fool I will keep going.  Remember <t> is the average, so <t>² is just the average squared.  Both of these are just numbers, and the summation symbol doesn't have any effect on them, so they can be taken outside the summation symbol.  The (N-1) factor could be taken out also, but I want to use it inside the summation.  What I've got now is

                  Σ t_i²/(N-1) - 2<t> Σ t_i/(N-1) + <t>²Σ[1/(N-1)].

The trouble arises because I need N and not N-1 in each of these terms.  What I'm gonna do is use N, then see what error or difference arises in comparison with the use of N-1.  Y'all know if N is a large number, N and N-1 are not that much different. But N=10, as in the lab handout we'll be getting back to soon, is not a large number.  Hmmm.  Anyway, using N, we have:
 

                      Σ t_i²/N - 2<t> Σ t_i/N + <t>²Σ1/N

Recall from way up above that the average is <t> = Σ t_i/N  (now you can see why I need N, not N-1)  so what we have in the middle term is just 2 <t><t>  =  2<t>².   And the first term is the average not of t but of t², written <t²>.  See how exciting this is?  We now have

                             <t²> - 2<t>²+ <t>²Σ1/N,

which is just what I wanted except for the "sum of one-over-N" part.  We used the summation symbol in the other terms and we have to use it here, too, even though it seems there's nothing to sum up.  The operation looks like this

 

                                              Σ1/N  =  (1/N)Σ(1),

 

or at least I'm guessing that's the way it can be written, and that

 

                                   Σ(1) = 1+1+1+ ... +1 = N.

 

So          Σ1/N =  (1/N) Σ(1) = (1/N)(1+1+1+ ... +1) = (1/N)N

                                                  =  1.

 

You following this?  We have

 

                                    <t²> - 2<t>²+ <t>²

 

                                =  <t²> - <t>²

 

Put this under the square root symbol, and you have the desired standard deviation expression, which in the movie is the standard deviation of the momentum, p, as written on the board behind Larry while he's talking to Sy in the classroom dream scene in A Serious Man.  I will use  (....)^1/2 instead of the usual radical symbol to show the square root:

                                     Δp = (<p² > - <p>²)^1/2

 

 

and we're done.  Except you need to watch the movie again, eh?  You missed so much the first time!

Not the standard deviation, dummie (sorry)

There I go again, mistating the facts.  Facts are neccesary of course, but I am more attracted to ideas, from which future facts can sometimes arise.

 

In my previous post I said the quantity in brackets in the People Aren't Perfect lab handout (my doubly previous post) is the standard deviation.  Nope.  It's just the old ordinary average, somewhat like Mr. Ordinary Smith in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Stage Fright, which I watched last night and enjoyed very much. 

 

This isn't the first time I've blundered slightly in regard to the standard deviation.  In my very first post on 14 August 2010 I couldn't remember what the thingy Larry put on the board related to the uncertainty principle is called (this is in the classroom dream sequence in A Serious Man).

 

In my second post, I remembered what it's called--hell yes, the standard deviation--but really didn't correctly state the way it's used in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.  I said "the product of the standard deviation of position and the standard deviation of momentum cannot be smaller than Planck’s constant divided by 4π."

 

Here's the better way of stating the uncertainty principle for position (that is, location) and momentum (mass times speed) of a particle, which I copied from the Hyperphysics website:  "The position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously measured with arbitrarily high precision. There is a minimum for the product of the uncertainties of these two measurements."

 

So, you see, in the Uncertainty Priniciple, we are talking about the uncertainties in measurement, and the fact (well it hasn't been disproved) that these uncertainties cannot be made arbitrarily small as was the thought-to-be case in classical physics.  When you quantify this mathematically, the uncertainty is expressed as the standard deviation, and the product of the standard deviation of x (location) with the standard deviation of p (momentum) cannot be smaller than, ta-da!, 5.27285863 × 10^-35 joule seconds.

As you can see the units are "energy times time," and the uncertainty principle applies to actual energy and time measurements the same way it does to position  and momentum measurements.  Yep, x times p has units of energy times time, or if you break it down to basic units, kilogram-(meter squared)/ second.  This particular combination of units is called "action" by physicists.  (You can supply your own pun here.)

 

By the way, if you have one of those T-shirts or bumper stickers from the Mean Eyed Cat bar in Austin that says "MEAN," you should not forget that this word is synonomous wtih "average."  So that same message would be written mathematically as  <your name here>.

 

Next time: back to the People Aren't Perfect lab, and how the standard deviation can be written in a simpler form using the average of the square minus the square of the average, which is what Larry puts  on the board (incorrectly at first; see my 14 Aug 2010 post) in the classroom dream sequence.

"Ahoy" no more

What I'd like to do next is look more into this thing called love, I mean this thing called <x>, sorry, in terms of what the brackets mean and how they were appropriated into quantum mechanics by Dirac, so that we have the bra, <x|, and the ket, |x>, notation.  It isn't "x" specifically that we're interested in, it's whatever symbol appears in the brackets, which may be any quantity that's being measured, such as time, t, or linear momentum, p, or whatever.

 

In my previous post, you can see that the brackets are used to represent the standard deviation, which in the case of the spread of error values around the average error in the measurement of time is given by the <t> expression in the lab handout.  We will soon see how that expression is the same as the more commonly used shorter one that appears in the uncertainty principle classroom dream scene in A Serious Man. 

 

But right now I'm just going to note that on this date according to my American Association of Physics Teachers' calendar, "In 1877, Thomas Edison coins telephone greeting 'Hello' instead of 'Ahoy, ahoy' supported by Alexander G. Bell."

People aren't perfect lab Summer 1974

Father's Day '77 and a 2-D complex vector space

I found an example from electrical engineering of a complex two-dimensional vector space.  If you already dislike math, you won't be too happy with these two pages from Circuits, Devices and Systems, © 1976, by Ralph J. Smith, used for a beginning EE class I took in the first summer term of 1977 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

 

I'm not sure if engineers still prefer to use the letter j instead of the usual letter i in writing a complex number, but they preferred it back in the seventies, so that's what the j is doing here (below), representing the imaginary part of a complex number.  Vectors may be written in different equivalent ways, and one of those ways is to use complex numbers, which have a real (x-axis) part and an imaginary (y-axis) part.  For example, in the number 8.66 - j5  (see below) the real part is 8.66 and the imaginary part is 5. 

What this author says about electrical engineering is also true of quantum mechanics.  We have electronic devices (especially iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc) that depend on recently-discovered quantum effects, but in studying how these devices work, and in making the discoveries they are based on, we need abstract ideas.  (Very abstract, not to mention formal, ideas!  That's what I'm trying to make more sense of in these writings of mine.  Quantum theory is too abstract to understand as it stands.)

Yeh, those are my comments in the margin from 36 summers ago concerning TV ownership.

Our vector in this example, below, is called a phasor, a term used in physics as well as engineering, and also in Star Trek, but with a different meaning.  Electrical voltages and currents in alternating current (AC) circuits are generally not "in phase" with each other.  A phasor has a voltage or current as its "amplitude," and it has a phase angle ("phase" for short).  The variation in time of amplitudes and phases of different currents and voltages can be kept track of by the use of phasors.

The "Imaginary" and "Real" axes make this graph (above)  a complex two-dimensional vector space.  The variation in time of  60 Hz, by the way, is the standard frequency of household AC voltage.  Whatever the frequency is, Kenneth, it must be the same for both vectors in order for them to be represented in this simple way.

So, the amplitudes and the phase angles of the two vectors (above) are what are important. And here's the importance of my choosing this example:  Amplitude and phase are what are important in quantum mechanics. They take on strange new significance:  In quantum measurements, an "amplitude" becomes a "probability amplitude," and phase angles between vectors become those "delicate phase relationships" that are responsible for the weirdness of quantum superposition.

But how does this relate to Father's Day of 1977?   Well, I was enrolled in the EE class and reading and working problems in this textbook then.  Also I'd recently found a job as the 4-pm-to-midnight night watchman at the Old State House in Little Rock.  So that's a couple of possible reasons I'm remembering this Father's Day so well.

My family had lunch at The Embers (actually the Plantation Embers), a white-table-cloth restaurant in a better-than-average highway motel called the Pine Bluff Motel.  I usually got roast lamb with mint jelly when we ate there, so that's probably what I ate for lunch.  And my gift for Dad on that Father's Day was a copy of the New York Times Book Review.

 

This may be another reason I remember that day better than other Father's Days.  I had just discovered that the Book Review by itself was available at Publisher's Bookshop in Little Rock.  Back then, it was impossible in Little Rock to get a copy of the New York Times on the day it came out. It took until Tuesday or Wednesday for the Sunday NYT to arrive by truck and be available for sale in LR.

When I handed a copy of the Book Review to Dad at The Embers, I said it was not an expensive gift but also not an easy one to get.  He said something like "Is this last week's?"  I had the pleasure of saying no, it was the current issue.  Whether he knew about the early availability of the Book Review, I don't know.  But he sure didn't let on.  Dad and I had been to New York together (on our way to Rome) the previous October.  Not that he even read the NYT, but he was bookish.

He also got a kick out of the big headline for the leading book review in that June 19, 1977, issue:  "Newton, Kant, Ruskin, Virgins All."  It was a review of "The Book of Lists". The memorable title of that review could be another reason I recall that day and giving him that as a gift.

P.S.  And let's not forget that one scene in A Serious Man takes place at a restaurant called Embers.

 

Country Joe and the troll doll

In the scene in A Serious Man where Danny runs into his room when he hears F-Troop start on his television set, when everybody is supposed to be sitting shiva for the deceased Sy Ableman, and Larry comes to the door of Danny's room and reminds him that they're supposed to be sitting shiva--and as usual in the movie, the child just ignores the command or question of the adult--on the floor of Danny's room a group of record albums can be seen on the left, the first one in the stack being a Country Joe and the Fish album. A little ways away from the albums, a troll doll is lying on the floor. Ah, yes, I remember mine fondly.

Interference of probability amplitudes, not photons

"The things that interfere in quantum mechanics are not particles. They are probability amplitudes for certain events." So says Roy J. Glauber in a letter to the editor of the American Journal of Physics, printed in the January 1995 issue. Glauber was describing how Dirac's writing that each photon interferes only with itself, and thus interference between different photons can never occur, is not strictly correct. So there. The great ones can get it wrong too, and frequently do, so don't worry too much about your own little pultritudinal mistakes.

2-D complex vector space is still waiting in the wings to be written about...