Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

Predicted by the Dirac equation.

We've likely known since forever that photons are created: just turn on a light and see gazillion of them come out!

Photon creation is easy because photons are massless, so there is not minimum energy to create them.

The creation of other particles is much rarer however, and took longer to be discovered, one notable milestone being the discovery of the positron.

In the case of the electron, we need to start with at least enough energy for the mass of the electron positron pair. This requires a photon with wavelength in the picometer range, which is not common in the thermal radiation of daily life.

TODO, including why the Schrodinger equation is not.

The Dirac equation can be derived basically "directly" from the Representation theory of the Lorentz group for the spin half representation, this is shown for example at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) 6.3 "Dirac Equation".

The Diract equation is the spacetime symmetry part of the quantum electrodynamics Lagrangian, i.e. is describes how spin half particles behave without interactions. The full quantum electrodynamics Lagrangian can then be reached by adding the $U(1)$ internal symmetry.

As mentioned at spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics, this same method allows us to analogously derive the equations for other spin numbers.

Bibliography:

Bibliography:

A relativistic version of the Schrödinger equation.

Correctly describes spin 0 particles.

The most memorable version of the equation can be written as shown at Section "Klein-Gordon equation in Einstein notation" with Einstein notation and Planck units:

Has some issues which are solved by the Dirac equation:

Bibliography:

Related: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics.

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.

Possible values are half integer numbers: 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, and so on.

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:

where:

Remember that $\psi$ 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 $\psi$ 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.

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.

Here's a copy online as of 2020: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCXB6BdMh9Y

This is the order in which you would want to transverse to read the chapters of a book.

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.:

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.

When viewed as matrices, it is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product, i.e.:This implies that it also preserves important geometric notions such as norm (intuitively: distance between two points) and angles.

This is perhaps the best "default definition".

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 $x$ and $y$ then we must have:i.e. the matrix inverse is equal to the transpose.

Conversely, if:is true, then

These matricese are called the orthogonal matrices.

TODO is there any more intuitive way to think about this?

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.