Abstract

Spontaneous emission is viewed as the continuous absorption of energy by an atomic oscillator followed by quantization during decay. Energy-time uncertainty can then be defined in a manifestly covariant way by establishing space-time boundaries on the action integral of the decay process; where the minimum of action is not zero, but h. First order equations are derived describing the emission of a photon. Second order emission is shown to yield the Feigenbaum equation. The similarities between them are noted. It is concluded that discrete forms of time, or oscillation periods, function as operators in Lagrangian quantum mechanics because they take as their inputs a delocalized superposition state and return as their outputs a localized quantum state. It is hypothesized that period doubling must be accompanied by asymmetric geometries.