TODO understand better, mentioned e.g. at Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 20, and is something that Einstein worked on.
Stimulated emission by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Photon hits excited electron, makes that electron go down, and generates a new identical photon in the process, with the exact same:This is the basis of lasers.
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.
The Klein-Gordon equation directly uses a more naive relativistic energy guess of squared.
But since this is quantum mechanics, we feel like making into the "momentum operator", just like in the Schrödinger equation.
But we don't really know how to apply the momentum operator twice, because it is a gradient, so the first application goes from a scalar field to the vector field, and the second one...
So we just cheat and try to use the laplace operator instead because there's some squares on it:
But then, we have to avoid taking the square root to reach a first derivative in time, because we don't know how to take the square root of that operator expression.
So the Klein-Gordon equation just takes the approach of using this squared Hamiltonian instead.
Since it is a Hamiltonian, and comparing it to the Schrödinger equation which looks like:
taking the Hamiltonian twice leads to:
We can contrast this with the Dirac equation, which instead attempts to explicitly construct an operator which squared coincides with the relativistic formula: derivation of the Dirac equation.
Spin (physics) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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:
Video 1.
Quantum Mechanics 9a - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat I by ViaScience (2013)
Source.
Video 3.
Understanding QFT - Episode 1 by Highly Entropic Mind (2023)
. Source. Maybe he stands a chance.
Abelian anyon by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
On particle exchange:
so it is a generalization of bosons and fermions which have and respectively.
Quantum field theory by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Theoretical framework on which quantum field theories are based, theories based on framework include:so basically the entire Standard Model
The basic idea is that there is a field for each particle particle type.
And then those fields interact with some Lagrangian.
One way to look at QFT is to split it into two parts:
Then interwined with those two is the part "OK, how to solve the equations, if they are solvable at all", which is an open problem: Yang-Mills existence and mass gap.
There appear to be two main equivalent formulations of quantum field theory:
Video 1.
Quantum Field Theory visualized by ScienceClic English (2020)
Source. Gives one piece of possibly OK intuition: quantum theories kind of model all possible evolutions of the system at the same time, but with different probabilities. QFT is no different in that aspect.
Video 2.
Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)
Source. Boring, does not give anything except the usual blabla everyone knows from Googling:
Video 3.
Quantum Field Theory: What is a particle? by Physics Explained (2021)
Source. Gives some high level analogies between high level principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and special relativity in to suggest that there is a minimum quanta of a relativistic quantum field.
Gauge symmetry by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Lawrence Krauss explains Gauge symmetry by Joe Rogan (2017)
Source.
While most of this is useless as you would expect from the channel, it does give one key idea: you can change charge locally, but things somehow still work out.
And this has something to do with the general intuition of special relativity that only local measures make much sense, as evidenced by Einstein synchronization.

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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