The whole discussion begs the question: If ℏ
is so convenient, why do we have h
around?
As usual, "historical reasons".
Planck originally invented h
as a proportionality constant. The problem he was solving was blackbody radiation, for which the experimental data came from spectroscopy people. And spectroscopy people used ν
(for frequency, for that or wavelengths were what they measured). So the data was tabulated in frequency. So, when he formulated his postulate, he used E=nhν
for his quantization.
In modern theory, we prefer working with ω
rather than ν
, because it is annoying to write sin(2πνt)
rather that sin(ωt)
. With angular frequencies, the quantization postulate becomes:
E=nh2πω
Now life sucks. So we invented the shorthand:
E=nℏω
Originally Posted by mojo
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