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Spin is one of the defining properties of elementary particles, i.e. number that describes how an elementary particle behaves, much like electric charge and mass.
The approach shown in this section: Section "Spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics" shows what the spin number actually means in general. As shown there, the spin number it is a direct consequence of having the laws of nature be Lorentz invariant. Different spin numbers are just different ways in which this can be achieved as per different Representation of the Lorentz group.
Video 1. "Quantum Mechanics 9a - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat I by ViaScience (2013)" explains nicely how:
- incorporated into the Dirac equation as a natural consequence of special relativity corrections, but not naturally present in the Schrödinger equation, see also: the Dirac equation predicts spin
- photon spin can be either linear or circular
- the linear one can be made from a superposition of circular ones
- straight antennas produce linearly polarized photos, and Helical antennas circularly polarized ones
- a jump between 2s and 2p in an atom changes angular momentum. Therefore, the photon must carry angular momentum as well as energy.
- cannot be classically explained, because even for a very large estimate of the electron size, its surface would have to spin faster than light to achieve that magnetic momentum with the known electron charge
- as shown at Video "Quantum Mechanics 12b - Dirac Equation II by ViaScience (2015)", observers in different frames of reference see different spin states
Quantum Spin - Visualizing the physics and mathematics by Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky (2016)
Source. where:
Remember that is a 4-vetor, gamma matrices are 4x4 matrices, so the whole thing comes down to a dot product of two 4-vectors, with a modified by matrix multiplication/derivatives, and the result is a scalar, as expected for a Lagrangian.
Like any other Lagrangian, you can then recover the Dirac equation, which is the corresponding equations of motion, by applying the Euler-Lagrange equation to the Lagrangian.
How genes form bodies.
Developmental Genetics 1 by Joseph Ross (2020)
Source. Talks about homeobox genes.Cody'sLab had a nice 5 video series on making it at home! But the United States Government asked him to take it down as suggested at Video "What's Been Going On With Cody'sLab? by Cody'sLab (2019)" at youtu.be/x1mv0vwb08Y?t=84.
Like breadth-first search, this also has the property of visiting parents before any children.
This is the order in which a binary search tree should be traversed for ordered output, i.e.:
- everything to the left is smaller than parent
- everything to the right is larger than parent
This ordering makes sense for binary trees and not k-ary trees in general because if there are more than two nodes it is not clear what the top node should go in the middle of.
This is unlike pre-order depth-first search and post-order depth-first search which generalize obviously to general trees.
Has the property of visiting all descendants before the parent.
The orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The orthogonal group is the group of all invertible matrices where the inverse is equal to the transpose by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Let's show that this definition is equivalent to the orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product.
Note that:and for that to be true for all possible and then we must have:i.e. the matrix inverse is equal to the transpose.
These matricese are called the orthogonal matrices.
TODO is there any more intuitive way to think about this?
The orthogonal group is the group of all matrices with orthonormal rows and orthonormal columns by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Or equivalently, the set of rows is orthonormal, and so is the set of columns. TODO proof that it is equivalent to the orthogonal group is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product.
The Taylor series expansion is the most direct definition of the expontial as it obviously satisfies the exponential function differential equation:
The basic intuition for this is to start from the origin and make small changes to the function based on its known derivative at the origin.
More precisely, we know that for any base b, exponentiation satisfies:And we also know that for in particular that we satisfy the exponential function differential equation and so:One interesting fact is that the only thing we use from the exponential function differential equation is the value around , which is quite little information! This idea is basically what is behind the importance of the ralationship between Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence via the exponential map. In the more general settings of groups and manifolds, restricting ourselves to be near the origin is a huge advantage.
- .
- .
Now suppose that we want to calculate . The idea is to start from and then then to use the first order of the Taylor series to extend the known value of to .
E.g., if we split into 2 parts, we know that:or in three parts:so we can just use arbitrarily many parts that are arbitrarily close to :and more generally for any we have:
Let's see what happens with the Taylor series. We have near in little-o notation:Therefore, for , which is near for any fixed :and therefore:which is basically the formula tha we wanted. We just have to convince ourselves that at , the disappears, i.e.:
The dot product is a positive definite matrix, and so we see that those will have an important link to familiar geometry.
The canonical undecidable problem.
One of the Holiest age old debugging techniques!
Git has some helpers to help you achieve bisection Nirvana: stackoverflow.com/questions/4713088/how-to-use-git-bisect/22592593#22592593
Obviously not restricted to software engineering alone, and used in all areas of engineering, e.g. Video "Air-tight vs. Vacuum-tight by AlphaPhoenix (2020)" uses it in vacuum engineering.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
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