Copasetic Flow

Detail View of the Lamb Shift Apparatus from [5] Note to the reader   The following was intended to be a summary of the Lamb shift experiment and the associated QED theory.  Instead, I was so impressed by Lamb, Retherford, and Bethe's communication abilities that while I point out the very abstract highlights of both the experiment and the theory, I get a little carried away with lauding the accomplishments of Lamb, Retherford, and Bethe. In quantum mechanics II today we studied the Lamb shift. The Dirac equation predicts that the S and P electron states of an atom such as hydrogen should have an accidental degeneracy, (an identical predicted energy state of the atom's electron for two different state of the atom-electron system). While several researchers tried to measure the energy of the two levels to determine if there were in fact degeneracies using optical techniques, they were unsuccessful.  In 1947 Willis Lamb and his graduate student Robert Retherford perf...

More interesting ideas have come up in the last few days than I have time to pursue.  I'm capturing them here with a brief synopsis of each and a few pointers to documents so you can read more about it and I'll remember where to find it later. We attended the  +American Physical Society  TX Section meeting last weekend in at Tarleton State Univesrity in Stephenville, TX.  I say we because it was my wife, the PhD physicist in the family, my brother-in-law, a physics grad. student and me.  I great time was had by all. I got to see a second presentation of the  new approach to the Schrodinger equation presentation given by Dr.Schlich at Texas A&M last week.  This version was given by Dr. Scully of A&M[1][2].  During the talk, Dr. Scully   mentioned two things that caught my ear as I was preparing the slides from my talk, (apologies Dr. Scully.)  They were, the Bohmian potential and a paper where he mentioned they had s...

I've been working on a history project peripherally for months, I'm just recording a few notes here as I still haven't gotten to the bottom of it.  Because I haven't arrived at the answer to my research yet, the following will ramble on a bit, but I wanted to capture my notes so far.  You see, my old electrical engineering courses keep creeping into my quantum classes and vice versa.  It's not that it's just the same math, it's also the same notation.  The ultimate answer to all of this may be that both subjects pulled their notation from pure mathematics. The latest inspiration for really looking into this came up as I was studying for my quantum midterm yesterday. I came across the following integral in Merzbacher that I felt certain I'd seen before (picture 1).  Merzbacher certainly felt it should be familiar since not a bit of explanation was given for its execution. When I got home, I pulled out my EE systems engineering book, "Discrete ...