Recent content by MadRocketSci2

I read it briefly last night. I appreciate the vacuum fluctuation myth portion - it meshes well with the impression I've formed so far beating my head against QFT. (PS - why are the popular mental pictures of what the math is supposed to be doing in QM so especially obscurantist and misleading...

If virtual particles are supposed to be some sort of Green's function excitation of a field following a particular Lagrangian or PDE (induced by the presence of another particle, free or virtual), then why are they allowed to be "off shell"? (Especially: Why are they allowed to be nonzero...

Thank you. I'll have to look at this more closely. To restate: The rate of the deflection then is proportional to the magnetic moment of the particle being acted on. Neutrons have the same spin as electrons (composite of 3 spin-1/2 quarks) but due to having higher mass have a lower magnetic...

So, my current understanding of spin is that when particles with a certain spin state hit a stern gerlach device, their wavefunction is split into components, deflection associated with one of the pure spin states aligned with the device. For spin 1/2 particles, there are only supposed to be two...

The Lorentz transformations and space rotations are the only example I am familiar with, in terms of continuous coordinate transformations for things that are usually given with units of different dimension. However, if there are any others I am unaware of, wouldn't the same logic apply...

Thank you. I was wondering why "two electrons on top of each other" was permissible in any case (and was trying to pursue some wild goose chase where a magnetic force singularity canceled the coulomb force singularity for opposite spins. I suppose this isn't necessary then.)

So, I was reading about the exchange interaction, and trying to work out what it referred to, and came across something strange in the treatment of the hydrogen molecule (I think it was on wikipedia): The hamiltonian given for the system included a term e2/(4πε0 * Rab) for the repulsion between...

<quote>Why do you believe this to be true? </quote> For states of finite energy, Phi doesn't (and cant) diverge from zero wherever the hamiltonian blows up. I'll need to confirm this later (when I have more time), but it has been true in my investigations so far.

I've seen it stated in many places that the reason why atoms don't collapse is due to the pauli exclusion principle. The exclusion principle is given as a required anti-symmetry in the wavefunction of electrons. I don't understand how this principle was derived, or where it comes from. (I've...

So, I've been looking into orbital angular momentum and magnetic moments, (which, at least in normal space with a normal angular topology seems limited to integer values of spin). (My model so far has been a parabolic potential harmonic oscillator in 3d, and the sort of spinning modes you can...

"Saying that the two-particle wavefunction ψ(x1, x2) vanishes when x1 = x2 does not prevent the two particles from being in the same state. " Well, it certainly means there is a zero amplitude for finding them in the same position state, right? This restriction would also apply to prevent...

I haven't regarded the Gibbs paradox as paradoxical in a while. Isn't the real point of it that it forces you to recognize the fundamental subjectivity of any given entropy measure? Why wouldn't something similar apply to quantum physics?

My impressions from self study so far: As an exercise, I derived a "real valued" second order in time version of the Schrödinger equation before. It didn't look very pretty (del^4 operators and whatnot) but there it was. I think the reason why we have chosen to represent this second-order wave...

I have a few questions about the Pauli exclusion principle: 1. Why do physicists believe that the symmetry in the wavefunction we assign to particles (indistinguishability) is due to an actual restriction in the physical state space that the particles can occupy (the attributes following from...

What do you mean by this?: I thought you could come up with any arbitrary geometric objects you wanted to, and make them "invariant" under a transform (any transform) if you scale the parts proportional to geometry when you change the geometry. Perhaps instead of spinor, I should say -...