Ciro Santilli's admiration for Dyson goes beyond his "unify all the things approach", which Ciro loves, but also extends to the way he talks and the things he says. Dyson is one of Ciro's favorite physicist.
Besides this, he was also very idealistic compassionate, and supported a peaceful resolution until World War II with United Kingdom was basically inevitable. Note that this was a strategic mistake.
Dyson is "hawk nosed" as mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Dyson". But he wasn't when he was young, see e.g. i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/freemandyson_child-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1064&ssl=1 It seems that his nose just never stopped growing after puberty.
He also has some fun stories, like him practicing night climbing while at Cambridge University, and having walked from Cambridge to London (~86km!) in a day with his wheelchair bound friend.
Ciro Santilli feels that the label child prodigy applies even more so to him than to Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
Bibliography:
- QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 9 Freeman Dyson and the Structure of Quantum Field Theory
Shot by Web of Stories.
The amount of detail in which he remembers all that happened is astounding. Not too different from the Murray Gell-Mann interview in that aspect.
Logical consequence, often referred to in formal logic as entailment, is a relationship between statements whereby one statement (or set of statements) necessarily follows from another statement (or set of statements). In other words, if a set of premises logically entails a conclusion, then if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. In more formal terms, we can express this using symbolic logic.
Example:
- the three most table polymorphs of calcium carbonate polymorphs are:
Richard Feynman was working under him there, and was promoted to team lead by him because Richard impressed Hans.
He was also the person under which Freeman Dyson was originally under when he moved from the United Kingdom to the United States.
And Hans also impressed Feynman, both were problem solvers, and liked solving mental arithmetic and numerical analysis.
This relationship is what brought Feynman to Cornell University after World War II, Hans' institution, which is where Feynman did the main part of his Nobel prize winning work on quantum electrodynamics.
Published on the session reports of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences at Berlin 1918 page 464.
Is about Maxwell's equations in curved spacetime, and notably introduces gauge theory.
Viewable for free at: archive.org/details/mobot31753002089727/page/464/mode/2up.
The wave equation contains the entire state of a particle.
From mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics remember that the wave equation is a vector in Hilbert space.
And a single vector can be represented in many different ways in different basis, and two of those ways happen to be the position and the momentum representations.
More importantly, position and momentum are first and foremost operators associated with observables: the position operator and the momentum operator. And both of their eigenvalue sets form a basis of the Hilbert space according to the spectral theorem.
When you represent a wave equation as a function, you have to say what the variable of the function means. And depending on weather you say "it means position" or "it means momentum", the position and momentum operators will be written differently.
This is well shown at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)".
Furthermore, the position and momentum representations are equivalent: one is the Fourier transform of the other: position and momentum space. Remember that notably we can always take the Fourier transform of a function in due to Carleson's theorem.
Then the uncertainty principle follows immediately from a general property of the Fourier transform: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fourier_transform&oldid=961707157#Uncertainty_principle
In precise terms, the uncertainty principle talks about the standard deviation of two measures.
We can visualize the uncertainty principle more intuitively by thinking of a wave function that is a real flat top bump function with a flat top in 1D. We can then change the width of the support, but when we do that, the top goes higher to keep probability equal to 1. The momentum is 0 everywhere, except in the edges of the support. Then:
- to localize the wave in space at position 0 to reduce the space uncertainty, we have to reduce the support. However, doing so makes the momentum variation on the edges more and more important, as the slope will go up and down faster (higher top, and less x space for descent), leading to a larger variance (note that average momentum is still 0, due to to symmetry of the bump function)
- to localize the momentum as much as possible at 0, we can make the support wider and wider. This makes the bumps at the edges smaller and smaller. However, this also obviously delocalises the wave function more and more, increasing the variance of x
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIIjIZBKgtI&list=PL54DF0652B30D99A4&index=59 "K2. Heisenberg Uncertainty Relation" by doctorphys (2011)
- physics.stackexchange.com/questions/132111/uncertainty-principle-intuition Uncertainty Principle Intuition on Physics Stack Exchange
Leo Szilard: The Genius Behind the Bomb
. Source. 1992. TODO an external link to the production? Producers credited at end: Helen Weiss and Alain Jehlen. As indicated at: archive.org/details/TheGeniusBehindtheBomb it was apparently produced by WGBH, public radio station from Boston.There is also a time-energy uncertainty principle, because those two operators are also complementary.
Education has become an expensive bureaucratic exercise, completely dissociated from reality and usefulness.
It completely rejects what the individual wants to achieve, and instead attempts to mass homogenize and test people through endless hours of boredom.
And the only goals it achieves are testing student's resilience to stress, and facilitating the finding of sexual partners. True learning is completely absent.
Teachers only teach because they have to do it to get paid, not for passion. Their only true incentive is co-authoring papers.
Education is meant to help us, the students, achieve our goals through passionate learning.
And, we, the students, are individuals, with different goals and capabilities.
The way we protest is to publish the knowledge from University for free, on the Internet, so that anyone can access it.
And we do this is a law-abiding way, without copyright infringement, so that no one can legally take it down.
We come to our courses just for the useless roll calls. But we already know all the subject better than the "teacher" on the very first day.
And we are already more famous than the "teacher" online, and through the Internet have already taught more way way more people than they ever will.
The effect of this is to demoralize the entire school system at all levels, until only one conclusion is possible: implosion.
And from the ashes of the old system, we will build a new one, which does only what matters with absolute efficiency: help the individual students achieve their goals.
A system in which the only reason why university exist will be to allow the most knowledgeable students to access million dollar laboratory equipment, and to pay the most prolific content creators so they can continue content creating.
No more useless courses. No more useless tests. Only passion, usefulness and focus.
This is a good book. It is rather short, very direct, which is a good thing. At some points it is slightly too direct, but to a large extent it gets it right.
The main goal of the book is to basically to build the Standard Model Lagrangian from only initial symmetry considerations, notably the Poincaré group + internal symmetries.
The book doesn't really show how to extract numbers from that Lagrangian, but perhaps that can be pardoned, do one thing and do it well.
Contains the full state of the quantum system.
This is in contrast to classical mechanics where e.g. the state of mechanical system is given by two real functions: position and speed.
The wave equation in position representation on the other hand encodes speed in "how fast does the complex phase spin around", and direction in "does it spin clockwise or counterclockwise", as described well at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)". Then once you understand that, it is more compact to just view those graphs with the phase color coded as in Video "Simulation of the time-dependent Schrodinger equation (JavaScript Animation) by Coding Physics (2019)".
Published by Werner Heisenberg in 1925-07-25 as quantum mechanical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations by Heisenberg (1925), it offered the first general formulation of quantum mechanics.
It is apparently more closely related to the ladder operator method, which is a more algebraic than the more analytical Schrödinger equation.
It appears that this formulation makes the importance of the Poisson bracket clear, and explains why physicists are so obsessed with talking about position and momentum space. This point of view also apparently makes it clearer that quantum mechanics can be seen as a generalization of classical mechanics through the Hamiltonian.
QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) mentions however that relativistic quantum mechanics broke that analogy, because some 2x2 matrix had a different form, TODO find that again.
Inward Bound by Abraham Pais (1988) chapter 12 "Quantum mechanics, an essay" part (c) "A chronology" has some ultra brief, but worthwhile mentions of matrix mechanics and the commutator.
DokuWiki about physics, mostly/fully written by Jakob Schwichtenberg and therefore focusing on particle physics, although registration might be open to all.
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 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.Figure 5. Web editor. 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.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - 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
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact








