Rob, the uncertainly principle derives from deeper concepts as John Sowa
writes. These have to do with the basic symmetries that physical laws have
to adhere to. One of these, for example, is invariance with respect to
translation
(in space ;-) from which the momentum/position conjugacy originates. Have a
look at the textbook
Course of Theoretical Physics : Mechanics (Course of Theoretical Physics)
by E M Lifshitz, L D Landau
and you will see how the principles of classical mechanics are developed
very
elegantly from intuitive ideas. These princples can be translated directly
to quantum mechanics (using different semantics) and this is how we get
conjugacy there.
The uncertainty principle is then a rigorous result about the product
of the standard deviation of two conjugate variables, but it originates as
John wrote from the idea of conjugacy and cannot exist without this notion.
If you want to formulate corpus linguistics in terms of physics, then first
find symmetries,
conserved quantities etc. and then see. This excercise will at least serve
to see
how far (if at all) the "QM analogy" can be pushed. I think it is better to
start from
first principles, rather than from the phenomena.
Yuval
On Tuesday 20 December 2005 17:29, you wrote:
> >
> > > Where does the QM analogy with grammar break down?
> >
> > For starters, ...
> > the operators for conjugate pairs, such as position-momentum
>
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