Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Micro means "small wavelength compared to radio waves", not micron-sized.

Microwave production and detection is incredibly important in many modern applications:

This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.

Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.

The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.

But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.

It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.

Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!

Easy to understand the motivation:

Hard to understand the motivation!

Currently an informal name for the Standard Model

Chronological outline of the key theories:

One of the leading figures of the early development of quantum electrodynamics.

Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:

But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:and in the understanding of the 2020 Standard Model the photon is one of the elementary particles.

This duality is fully described mathematically by quantum electrodynamics, where the photon is modelled as a quantized excitation of the photon field.

Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.

And predicting the future is the first step towards controlling it, i.e.: engineering.

Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.

Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.

Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.

Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.

Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:

As of 2019, all known physics can be described by two theories:

Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.

Ah, the jewel of computational physics.

Also known as an ab initio method: no experimental measurement is taken as input, QED is all you need.

But since QED is thought to fully describe all relevant aspects molecules, it could be called "the" ab initio method.

For one, if we were able to predict protein molecule interactions, our understanding of molecular biology technologies would be solved.

No more ultra expensive and complicated X-ray crystallography or cryogenic electron microscopy.

And the fact that quantum computers are one of the most promising advances to this field, is also very very exciting: Section "Quantum algorithm".

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.

E.g. in QED, one for the electron and one for the photon: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/166709/are-electron-fields-and-photon-fields-part-of-the-same-field-in-qed.

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:

Quantum mechanics is quite a broad term. Perhaps it is best to start approaching it from the division into:

Key experiments that could not work without quantum mechanics: Section "Quantum mechanics experiment".

Mathematics: there are a few models of increasing precision which could all be called "quantum mechanics":

Ciro Santilli feels that the largest technological revolutions since the 1950's have been quantum related, and will continue to be for a while, from deeper understanding of chemistry and materials to quantum computing, understanding and controlling quantum systems is where the most interesting frontier of technology lies.

The first really good quantum mechanics theory made compatible with special relativity was the Dirac equation.

And then came quantum electrodynamics to improve it: Dirac equation vs quantum electrodynamics.

TODO: does it use full blown QED, or just something intermediate?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtnsHtYYKf0 "Mercury and Relativity - Periodic Table of Videos" by Periodic Videos (2013). Doesn't give the key juicy details/intuition. Also mentioned on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_chemistry#Mercury

Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:

Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):

Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/

quantum electrodynamics lectures:

Feynman was apparently seriously interested/amused by computer:

Two official websites?

High level timeline of his life:

In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)

Talk title shown on intro: "Today's Answers to Newton's Queries about Light".

6 hour lecture, where he tries to explain it to an audience that does not know any modern physics. This is a noble effort.

Part of The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures lecture series.

Feynman apparently also made a book adaptation: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. That book is basically word by word the same as the presentation, including the diagrams.

According to www.feynman.com/science/qed-lectures-in-new-zealand/ the official upload is at www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 and Vega does show up as a watermark on the video (though it is too pixilated to guess without knowing it), a project that has been discontinued and has has a non-permissive license. Newbs.

4 parts:This talk has the merit of being very experiment oriented on part 2, big kudos: how to teach and learn physics

TODO. Can't find it easily. Anyone?

This is closely linked to the Pauli exclusion principle.

What does a particle even mean, right? Especially in quantum field theory, where two electrons are just vibrations of a single electron field.

Another issue is that if we consider magnetism, things only make sense if we add special relativity, since Maxwell's equations require special relativity, so a non approximate solution for this will necessarily require full quantum electrodynamics.

As mentioned at lecture 1 youtube.com/watch?video=H3AFzbrqH68&t=555, relativistic quantum mechanical theories like the Dirac equation and Klein-Gordon equation make no sense for a "single particle": they must imply that particles can pop in out of existence.

Bibliography:

The first key paper to his approach to quantum electrodynamics apparently.

Published on Physical Review 76.769.

A single line in the emission spectrum.

So precise, so discrete, which makes no sense in classical mechanics!

Has been the leading motivation of the development of quantum mechanics, all the way from the:

So that he can work full time on OurBigBook.com and revolutionize advanced university-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics eduction for all ages.

Donating to Ciro is the most effective donation per dollar that you can make to:

Ciro's goal in life is to help kids as young as possible to reach, and the push, the frontiers of natural sciences human knowledge, linking it to applications that might be the the next big thing as early as possible. Because nothing is more motivating to students than that feeling of:rather than repeating the same crap that everyone is already learning.

To do this, Ciro wants to work in parallel both on:

Ciro believes that this rare combination of both:produces a virtuous circle, because Ciro:

As explained at OurBigBook.com and high flying bird scientist, Ciro is most excited to make contributions at the "missing middle level of specialization" that lies around later undergrad and lower grad education:But on that middle sweet spot, Ciro believes that something can be done, in such as way that delivers:in a way that is:

Ciro believes that today's society just keep saying over and over: "STEM is good", "STEM is good", "STEM is good" as a religious mantra, but fails miserably at providing free learning material and interaction opportunities for people to actually learn it at a deep enough level to truly appreciate why "STEM is good". This is what he wants to fix.

The following quote is ripped from Gwern Branwen's Patreon page, and it perfectly synthesizes how Ciro feels as well:

In addition to all of this, financial support also helps Ciro continue his general community support activities:

As of 2019, the more formal name for particle physics, which is notably missing general relativity to achieve the theory of everything.

cds.cern.ch/record/799984/files/0401010.pdf The Making of the Standard Model by Steven Weinberg mentions three crucial elements that made up the standard model post earlier less generalized quantum electrodynamics understandings

One of Ciro Santilli's strongest feeling in education is that material often falls in either of the two categories:

Ciro believes that there is often an important missing link between them, e.g.:

If we as a society are unable to provide this sweet Middle Way sweet-spot, it is unreasonable to expect that learners will ever have the motivation to advance, because it is just too boring! They are just more likely to go play video games instead.

It is Ciro's hope that OurBigBook.com will help to fill exactly that gap.

In Ciro's view, as of the 2020's this critical gap generally lies somewhere between the end of undergraduate studies, and at the start of postgraduate studies.

What we have to do is make this knowledge more accessible all way down to high school and earlier.

Let's take the gloves off more often, and give the full thing to interested students! Let students learn what they want to learn, and do that as soon as possible! Life is too short!

This problem is basically the knowledge version of the last mile problem. When we reach the end of graduate, there are enough directions of knowledge to go off into, that the probability that a great free tutorial exists is relatively low. Of course, as one approaches the realm of novel research, the branching is so wide that having perfect tutorials becomes impossible. Ciro's goal in life go push the last mile marker a bit further out.

Related:

Bibliography:

Everyone is beginner when the field is new, and there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

For example, Ciro Santilli felt it shocking how direct and satisfying Richard Feynman's scientific vulgarization of quantum electrodynamics were, e.g. at: Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979), and that if he had just assumed minimal knowledge of mathematics, he was about to give a full satisfactory picture in just a few hours.

Other supporters of this: