3 ms·

I know about unitary in math. Just what QM does with it I don't know yet! I'm eager enough to further develop my intuitive understanding. My ugrad physics pr

I know about unitary in math. Just what QM does with it I don't know yet! I'm eager enough to further develop my intuitive understanding. My ugrad physics prof said I had "a good feeling for physics" -- that was after I blew away everyone else in his freshman physics class!! :-) Yes, being careful can yield new results in old fields. I've published two papers that apparently did that, one paper in optimization and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions and one in mathematical statistics. In physics I'm not really trying to publish tricky papers at the core of the foundations, but I do get the impression that quite a lot about QM is still a bit fuzzy to nearly everyone. So, I'd like to clean that up, as much as I can, both intuitively and mathematically. Going into the details about how to get approximations, etc. about the orbitals of the water molecule, likely relevant enough for a physics student, seems a bit of a detail I'm willing to skip over. And generally I'm willing enough to take the results of the more famous experiments at essentially face value although might try to differ on the explanations. My ugrad physics prof pushed hard on the MM experiment, Young's double slit, and Fabry-Perot, and it's amazing how close those remain to challenging current topics.

lmm 9y ago
> I do get the impression that quite a lot about QM is still a bit fuzzy to nearly everyone. I have the opposite experience; QM is really very clean, coherent, elegant, and well-understood - far more so than GR, I found. The people who want it to work like classical physics get themselves (and anyone who listens to them) awfully confused, but that confusion goes away, and you get a much better appreciation for what QM does if you put aside the "big questions" for a while and do some concrete computation. At least that's how it worked for me.

lmm 9y ago

> I do get the impression that quite a lot about QM is still a bit fuzzy to nearly everyone. I have the opposite experience; QM is really very clean, coherent, elegant, and well-understood - far more so than GR, I found. The people who want it to work like classical physics get themselves (and anyone who listens to them) awfully confused, but that confusion goes away, and you get a much better appreciation for what QM does if you put aside the "big questions" for a while and do some concrete computation. At least that's how it worked for me.