The symplectic egg in classical and quantum mechanics

Symplectic geometry is the language of Classical Mechanics in its Hamiltonian formulation, and it also plays a crucial role in Quantum Mechanics. Symplectic geometry seemed to be well understood until 1985, when the mathematician Gromov discovered a surprising and unexpected property of canonical transformations: the non-squeezing theorem. Gromov's result, nicknamed the "principle of the symplectic camel," seems at first sight to be an abstruse piece of pure mathematics. It turns out that it has fundamental-and unsuspected-consequences in the interpretations of both Classical and Quantum Mechanics, because it is essentially a classical form of the uncertainty principle. We invite the reader to a journey taking us from Gromov's non-squeezing theorem and its dynamical interpretation to the quantum uncertainty principle, opening the way to new insights. (C) 2013 American Association of Physics Teachers. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4791775]