Posted on 11 June 2017 - 12:09 PM

Is anyone else interested in this?

Posted on 11 June 2017 - 12:46 PM

no

Posted on 11 June 2017 - 02:52 PM

i am somehow

Posted on 11 June 2017 - 03:31 PM

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Posted on 12 June 2017 - 10:39 AM

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Posted on 12 June 2017 - 11:49 AM

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Last edited on 12 June 2017 - 12:50 PM by MeMyselfAndCube

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-when-a-man-sits-with-a-pretty-girl-for-an-hour-it-seems-like-a-minute-but-let-him-sit-on-a-hot-albert-einstein-226545.jpg
This sums it up pretty well.

Posted on 12 June 2017 - 01:12 PM

Quantum mechanics is really good stuff. It is a different way of thinking. Though, you often do cling to your classical analogues quite a bit, e.g., momentum and energy.

Instead of treating the dynamics of a system as you would in classical mechanics with knowing your position and momentum at each time t, you treat states as vectors in a complex vector space (technically, a Hilbert space, but that allows for your spaces to be infinite-dimensional) and evolve them with the Schrödinger equation. Your observables like position and momentum are given by Hermitian operators (which you can often represent as matrices).

But QM also brings something completely unheard of in classical mechanics: uncertainty (well, unless maybe in classical statistical mechanics). You may have heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You cannot know with pure certainty the results of a measurement before it happens. The idea is that by measuring a quantity, we force it to take a value. The analogy I read about was "Is the moon really there when we don't look at it?" It is a bit weird to think about. Of course, if we see it once, we know it will be probably be there when we look back. QM accounts for this by the "collapse of the wave function." After a measurement, the wave function of the particle or whatever we are studying localizes around the value that was measured, so if we measure it again, we should get the same value (I am leaving out some details, as I didn't even say what a wave function is).

Albert Einstein actually thought this innate uncertainty of QM was a bunch of bull. See the EPR paradox if you are interested.

If you want to learn QM, and you have had multivariable calculus, I recommend Griffiths' book on the subject. QM and virtually all physics at this level and higher are very math intensive. So be prepared!




Do you mean special relativity? GR is what follows from SR. Special relativity is relativity of flat spacetime, and it is what we are used to in most scenarios. GR is "big" relativity in curved spacetime and gives the consequence that gravity is spacetime curvature by the equivalence principle. And GR is usually only taken by advanced physics undergrads or grad students. It is REALLY mathy, given that differential geometry is key to its development.

Actually, neither of these are pre-reqs for quantum mechanics. If you want to put SR in QM, that is quantum field theory. If you want to put GR in QM, good luck. Putting GR in quantum theory is still a big topic of research.

Last edited on 12 June 2017 - 02:05 PM by *deleted-191881

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