Recent content by Albertus Magnus

I just wanted to add: the Feynmann Lectures on Physics are available free online and they are awesome! He covers classical mechanics, electromagnetism and quantum While teaching some maths along the way. This would be a good place to get some of that vector calculus.

I haven't checked on these specific titles, but I often buy physics texts at thrift books or on Ebay, for example I just got an older edition but still perfectly useful copy of Gradshteyn and Rhyzik $20.00 on ebay, whereas a new copy would have cost me about $200.00. A copy of Haliday and...

So glad that you are interested in physics! Those who can do physics should do physics. At any rate the first thing you will study at university will be a freshman physics with calculus type course. We used the popular text by Haliday, Resnick and Walker, this is a classic intro text that has...

How does one know what is real apart from the models one uses to make sense of observation? Perhaps, the only things that are real are the observations?

I recently checked my email and noticed that there is a tone of messages that tell me things like who reacted to a post, etc. Is there a way to get this to stop? I just like to login here and see what is up as opposed to having my email filled up.

You can use "\cdot" to write your dot products correctly.

You could have a Hamiltonian with an ##e^{-x^2}## term. Potentials such as ##e^{x^2}## are unphysical as they do not go to zero at infinity.

Yes, one of the early mistakes I made when studying quantum mechanics was to confuse the state space or Hilbert space of quantum mechanics with the whole of ##L^2##. The space of square integrable functions is larger by far than the relevant quantum mechanical space, further sometimes as...

Quantum mechanics is more than a handful of seemingly relevant quantities. Consider the following thought experiment. Given a quantum system, one should be able to perform a measurement corresponding to an operator ##A## and then perform a subsequent measurement on the same system corresponding...

Congratulations! I am at the present a very new member of the PF, however, already I have had the benefit help from @berkeman

Carpenter often use it to check that their work is "square", i.e. joined at a right angle. The idea is to make a mark at three feet along one board followed by a mark at four feet along the other board, then check that the straight line distance from one mark to the other is exactly five feet.

The spectrum of the Hamiltonian for the free particle is continuous as opposed to discrete, thus there is no need to index them by a discrete label like "## n##", rather think of them as labeled by the wave number ##k##: $$E={{\hbar}^2k^2\over 2m}.$$ The solutions are...

Metallica's cover of Bob Sieger's Turn the Page is better than the original by far!

"Wir mussen wissen - wir werden wissen!" - David Hilbert (Translates into English as: "We must know - we will know!")

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr