Tag: Quantum Mechanics

Poetry: Representations

Finally, a revelation! I was asking myself: Why do I often find ancient, terse, illustration-free textbooks easier to follow than their modern, friendly, playful, illustrated, multi-media-enhanced counterparts? Case in point (and I know that not everybody will agree): Paul Dirac’s legendary Principles of Quantum Mechanics or the definitive course on theoretical physics, the volumes by…
Spinning Projection – a Tiny Canvas Print, a Long Time in the Making

These spheres and lines have been haunting me. I have been writing about stereographic projection so often – and created so much related geometrical art – that I created a blog post just for curating all the links to my own articles: Stereographic Retrospective. This year, I have created a series of six drawings of…
Polar Glitch

I’ve embraced a new genre of art! I published my first video here, without telling anybody: Glitch in My Diffracted Dreams went online without notification e-mails. I wanted to upload the video somewhere without much of an explanatory text. There won’t be explanations today either, just random thoughts. I had resisted the urge to create…
Spinning Rotations

There was a time when I was not sure if I wanted to create scientific visualizations or art, or both. With SageMath, I created images like this: This image part of the article Spins, Rotations, and the Beauty of Complex Numbers – where I used styled the formulas to match the aesthetics of the illustrations.…
Frozen Harmonics Floating in Deep Space

First, I saw only boring structures. Now I am overwhelmed with choices! It took me a while to find a strategy for harvesting the so-called spherical harmonic functions for art. Spherical harmonics pop up in different sub-fields of physics – whenever you need to describe something that changes along the surface of a sphere, using…
Sparse Spectral Spaceport: Psi Psi Star

I could say, I am just numbering the artworks in this series by using Greek letters. So this one is item Psi! But I have created a sparse spaceport from diffraction curves in spectral colors. It is not a single Psi, but rather a Psi Psi Star … … the absolute square of the wave…
Spins, Rotations, and the Beauty of Complex Numbers

This is a simple quantum state … |➚> = α|↑> + β|↓> … built from an up |↑> state and a down state |↓>. α and β are complex numbers. The result |➚> is in the middle, oblique. The oblique state is a superposition or the up and down base states. Making a measurement, you…
Integrating the Delta Function (Again) – Dirac Version

The Delta Function is, roughly speaking, shaped like an infinitely tall and infinitely thin needle. It’s discovery – or invention – is commonly attributed to Paul Dirac[*]. Dirac needed a function like this to work with integrals that are common on quantum mechanics, a generalization of a matrix that has 1’s in the diagonal and…
Poetry: Dynamical Variables and Observables

The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the second chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition, Dynamical Variables and Observables. we may look upon the passagefor the triple product We therefore make the general rulein spite of this fundamental difference which conforms with our notationThe rule…
Poetry: The Principle of Superposition

The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the first chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition, The Principle of Superposition. ~ one would be inclined to thinkThere must certainly be some internal motion from general philosophical groundswe cannot expect to find any causal connexion observe what…
Entropy and Dimensions (Following Landau and Lifshitz)

Some time ago I wrote about volumes of spheres in multi-dimensional phase space – as needed in integrals in statistical mechanics. The post was primarily about the curious fact that the ‘bulk of the volume’ of such spheres is contained in a thin shell beneath their hyperspherical surfaces. The trick to calculate something reasonable is…
Learning Physics, Metaphors, and Quantum Fields

In my series on Quantum Field Theory I wanted to document my own learning endeavors but it has turned into a meta-contemplation on the ‘explain-ability’ of theoretical physics. Initially I had been motivated by a comment David Tong made in his introductory lecture: Comparing different QFT books he states that Steven Weinberg‘s books are hard reads because at…
On the Relation of Jurassic Park and Alien Jelly Flowing through Hyperspace

Yes, this is a serious physics post – no. 3 in my series on Quantum Field Theory. I promised to explain what Quantization is. I will also argue – again – that classical mechanics is unjustly associated with steampunk pictures of clocks and trains. It looks more like representations of time-lines in Back to the…
May the Force Field Be with You: Primer on Quantum Mechanics and Why We Need Quantum Field Theory

As Feynman explains so eloquently – and yet in a refreshingly down-to-earth way – understanding and learning physics works like this: There are no true axioms, you can start from anywhere. Your physics knowledge is like a messy landscape, built from different interconnected islands of insights. You will not memorize them all, but you need…