Is Schrödinger's Cat
Object-Oriented?
By Adolfo M. Nemirovsky
Why Natural Scientists Should Care
About Object-Oriented Technology
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Object-Oriented technology is gaining rapid acceptance among software
developers, and is becoming the preferred choice for modern computer programming
projects. Should a natural scientist care? We discuss some of the main
concepts in object-oriented programming and the potential of this interesting
technology. The object model views the world as made of many objects interacting
(exchanging messages) with each other to produce a collective behavior.
This picture resembles a quantum system of interacting particles. Suggestive
analogies between the object model and quantum physics are identified and
exploited in this work to provide an introduction to object-oriented programming
This paper is directed to natural scientists and graduate/advanced
undergraduate students in physical sciences. Some basic concepts of
quantum physics at the level of introductory courses in modern
physics or physical chemistry is assumed. Background in quantum
mechanics is helpful but not required to understand most of this
work. No prior knowledge of C/C++ and object oriented
programming is assumed. Most of the C++ code illustrating some of
the physics examples presented in the paper is given in the
Appendices.
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