Welcome (May 13, 2025)

Good Morning,

I hope your semester ended well and that you have a fun summer planned. 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 over the summer.

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?

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 and Art Friedman an 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.

The history of the development of quantum mechanics is very interesting. However, we will only touch on some aspects of it in the course. Most of the story is what you should find in your Modern Physics course. Sean Carroll gives his version in the video, A Brief History of Quantum Mechanics - with Sean Carroll. It's an interesting lecture as he goes beyond what we will cover, such as the Many-World and hidden variables interpretations. [He begins with an App – Universe Splitter. This is interesting. See Free Universe Splitter: https://freeuniversesplitter.com/.] My current history is given in First Day Lecture PDF.

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 read mre recenlty 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 have not updated it yet for next semester.

See you in the Fall!

"There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possible avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." Richard P. Feynman, The Messenger Lectures, 1964, MIT

P.S. Nobel Prizes:

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced Tuesday in October 7, 11:45 AM CEST. [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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