Please help me, I can't understand quantum mechanics.
Please help me, I can't understand quantum mechanics.
Dr Richard Feynman had said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.".
I shall try to blabber a bit to help you understand what he meant.
In Short:
- Follow some good text and reference books
- Use this basic philosophy:
Every Physical Quantity may be Quantized, i.e. it has a unit constituent that cannot be further divided any further, viz. matter and energy. Some have already been experimentally verified and for the others, there are A Few Good Men at work.
I will tell you a story, rather than using Mathematical equations
Fair enough.
It all began with the Waves. The phenomena of waves were appreciably, accurately, mathematically as well as experimentally verifiably described by classical mechanics thanks to the geniuses (Physicists and Mathematicians) such as Newton, Laplace, Euler and d’Alembert and a few others. Then came James Clerk Maxwell and included radiations and light as ElectroMagnetic (EM) waves from which Einstein got his inspiration for Special and General Relativity. This was one school of thought.
The problem began with Max Plank’s research results and hypotheses. Some his observations could not be explained by the classical school of Physics. While studying radiations from blackbodies, he came to the conclusion that radiations (thermal and EM) are quantized which means these waves have a fundamental unit (called quantum) that cannot exist in fractions. He was experimentally verified to be right. Let’s call that quantum as Photon. Max Plank used to belong to the school of Classical Physics but soon became an inspiration to the other school of Physicists who did not have a label.
In the other (initially an arch rival to the first) were bright, innovative and most importantly daring Physicists like, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, deBroglie and a few others. They extensively studied the ‘Atom’ and especially the Electron and its various orbits around the nucleus. Inspired by Plank and led by Bohr, they not only developed a new theory that tried to explain the behaviour of the subatomic world, but also contradicted the laws that were developed by the Classical School. They called their product as Quantum Mechanics. Of course their challenge was only limited to the subatomic realm. But this bothered the Classical Physicists. That brought upon an era of discussions, meetings and conventions which was nothing less than a war in spirit.
Here came my another personal Physics hero, Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered the wave equation that formed a bridge between the two schools by using wave-particle duality as the basic philosophy (every quantum particle can also be treated as a wave). The trick was to write the appropriate wave equation for each particle that was supposed to be the quantum of its kind and then solving the equation for various conditions (fashionably called QUANTUM STATES) to obtain predictions with good approximations. Why approximation? Because as Heisenberg had correctly said, there will always be an amount of uncertainty in the measurement of positon and momentum associated with every particle, which becomes relatively too critical to ignore for subatomic domain.
Dr Richard Feynman had said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.".
I shall try to blabber a bit to help you understand what he meant.
In Short:
- Follow some good text and reference books
- Use this basic philosophy:
Every Physical Quantity may be Quantized, i.e. it has a unit constituent that cannot be further divided any further, viz. matter and energy. Some have already been experimentally verified and for the others, there are A Few Good Men at work.
I will tell you a story, rather than using Mathematical equations
Fair enough.
It all began with the Waves. The phenomena of waves were appreciably, accurately, mathematically as well as experimentally verifiably described by classical mechanics thanks to the geniuses (Physicists and Mathematicians) such as Newton, Laplace, Euler and d’Alembert and a few others. Then came James Clerk Maxwell and included radiations and light as ElectroMagnetic (EM) waves from which Einstein got his inspiration for Special and General Relativity. This was one school of thought.
The problem began with Max Plank’s research results and hypotheses. Some his observations could not be explained by the classical school of Physics. While studying radiations from blackbodies, he came to the conclusion that radiations (thermal and EM) are quantized which means these waves have a fundamental unit (called quantum) that cannot exist in fractions. He was experimentally verified to be right. Let’s call that quantum as Photon. Max Plank used to belong to the school of Classical Physics but soon became an inspiration to the other school of Physicists who did not have a label.
In the other (initially an arch rival to the first) were bright, innovative and most importantly daring Physicists like, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, deBroglie and a few others. They extensively studied the ‘Atom’ and especially the Electron and its various orbits around the nucleus. Inspired by Plank and led by Bohr, they not only developed a new theory that tried to explain the behaviour of the subatomic world, but also contradicted the laws that were developed by the Classical School. They called their product as Quantum Mechanics. Of course their challenge was only limited to the subatomic realm. But this bothered the Classical Physicists. That brought upon an era of discussions, meetings and conventions which was nothing less than a war in spirit.
Here came my another personal Physics hero, Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered the wave equation that formed a bridge between the two schools by using wave-particle duality as the basic philosophy (every quantum particle can also be treated as a wave). The trick was to write the appropriate wave equation for each particle that was supposed to be the quantum of its kind and then solving the equation for various conditions (fashionably called QUANTUM STATES) to obtain predictions with good approximations. Why approximation? Because as Heisenberg had correctly said, there will always be an amount of uncertainty in the measurement of positon and momentum associated with every particle, which becomes relatively too critical to ignore for subatomic domain.
