Welcome! (to be sent)

Welcome to the weird world of quantum mechanics, the domains of Schrodinger's cat and thought experiments! Sharpen your pencils and open you minds ... you are about to learn about eigenstates, operators, bras and kets, and why atomic orbitals look the way they do. What is a Gaussian? What is Feynman's trick? Are you getting excited yet for PHY 444?

You are currently enrolled in PHY 444. I hope you had a good break. It is almost time to get back to classes. We will be meeting three days a week (4 hours) at 8:00 AM MWF starting next Wednesday! I expect your eager minds will be prepared to be in class, on time, every day. You will be successful in this class if you keep up with the reading, turn your work in on time, and come to every class. More importantly, your first task is to locate my office as you should come to it often. I am in Sartarelli Hall 2007J. I should be able to accommodate a couple of people in my office at the same time.

See the below email that I sent a few weeks ago for additional readings for now or next summer.

That should be enough for now. I have posted some assignments and you should start reading the text and working on them. Plan to read the chapters more than once and note that you cannot do the homework in one day. You need to plan to start the problems early! Hopefully, I do not have to make too many more edits of the website.

That should get you excited for a new year! Remember, I am here to help you grapple with quantum theory and point you in the direction of graduation. your first assignment is to send me an email introducing yourself.

See you soon ...

July 10th

I hope your semester ended well and you are enjoying your summer. In about another month we will be back! You are currently registered for PHY 444, Quantum Mechanics, and this may be far from your mind. Now is a good time to think of doing some light physics reading

The text we will be using is Townsend's Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Ed., 2012. However, you might find Quantum Mechanics, The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman and interesting supplement. Susskind's book is closely related to the philosophy of our book. He starts out discussing many of the things we will cover in the first part of the class. Also, his lectures for this course are online and it might be helpful to go through some of these lectures, http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/quantum-mechanics/2012/winter/lecture-1

The approach taken in these books was supposedly inspired by the Feynman Lectures. Did you know that entire set of lectures can be read online? Volume III is on quantum mechanics - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_toc.html . Speaking of Feynman, you might consider reading Feynman's QED, a small text on his quantum theory of light. You could also watch his lectures http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8.

I had posted a list of books at http://people.uncw.edu/hermanr/booklist.htm. These are mostly popular books in different areas of physics. One I read that I thought captured the essence of quantum entanglement was Dance of the Photons by Anton Zellinger. A master teacher leads students through a series of experiments towards understanding the strangeness of quantum measurement. Other good books are The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder, Quantum, Manjit Kumar, The Quantum Story, Jim Baggot. If you are interested in biographies, there are bios on Einstein, Dirac, Oppenheimer. There are recent ones on Fermi -   The Pope of Physics and The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age.

For those interested in what quantum computing is about, I have a whole resource page at https://people.uncw.edu/hermanr/QC.htm.

For reading on gravitational waves, there is Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin. (Author of How the Universe Got its Spots. And her most recent book was Black Hole Survival Guide.) There is The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel.

A couple of years ago I read The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb. It was an interesting story. One I have been reading this month is Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History. This is about Klaus Fuchs. According to the blurb, "Klaus Fuchs knew more nuclear secrets in the last two years of the Second World War than anyone else in Britain. He was taken onto the Manhattan Project in the USA as a trusted physicist - and was the conduit by which knowledge of the highest classification passed to the Soviet Union."

The course website is at https://people.uncw.edu/hermanr/qm/. I've started updating it for next semester  and the tentative schedule is posted.

See you in a month!

P.S. Nobel Prizes:

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on the first Tuesday in October, 11:45 a.m. [5:45 AM EST]. Check out the latest prizes and the acceptance speaches at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-physics/ .

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