Feynman lectures online quantum mechanics
For Feynman, the Hamiltonian is just another operator that can do things with the state. In some sense, this "delay" with which Feynman introduces the time dependence is one of the main differences of his attitude to quantum mechanics relatively to average courses that would love to start with the dynamical equations "immediately". In quantum mechanics, the time dependence is controlled by the Hamiltonian which is discussed in the eighth chapter. The time dependence is only introduced in the seventh chapter. Chapters five and six discuss spin-1 and spin-1/2 particles in detail. The third chapter discusses the operations we do with the probability amplitudes, their addition and linearity, and prepares you for identical particles discussed in the fourth chapter. I would formulate the statement more carefully: a theory (in this case quantum mechanics) is allowed (but not obliged!) to declare questions about the things we can't measure as meaningless questions.
In physics, quantum mechanics has reinforced the picture that we shouldn't talk about things we can't measure. So he confines the discussion to physics. Feynman says that philosophical implications of physics are completely distorted when imported to other fields. The last section of the chapter tells you about the philosophical implications – about uncertainty and the probabilistic character of predictions that was already there in classical (statistical) physics in almost all practical applications and quantum mechanics just turned this "practical status quo" into a fundamentally new way how the laws of physics have to be formulated. The second chapter explains how the particle and wave interpretations co-exist. Interference and the postulates of quantum mechanics are discussed in the very first chapter, too. So that's where he starts in Chapter one. He has believed that you will understand all the subtle conceptual issues of quantum mechanics if you think about the double slit experiment carefully enough. You may want to be reminded about some of Feynman's educational philosophy. Recall that the third volume is dedicated to quantum mechanics. It seems to me that all the errata have been incorporated. Only Volume I was available at that time.
Feynman lectures online quantum mechanics free#
In September, I mentioned that some folks were transforming the Feynman Lectures on Physics to free web pages with MathJax, the same \(\rm\LaTeX\)-based system to write elegant mathematical expressions that has been used on this blog for two years or so.
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