> Hi. Here. Doug
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Invitation to content? Sure, but it will probably put everybody to sleep...
Several things. I wish Joel had mentioned Gunter Grass's bad poem because it must have been brewing when you interviewed him.
Joanna's link to Taibbi was so depressing, I went back to the intricate history of quantum mechanics development in the interviews between Thomas Kuhn and Paul Dirac. I still strongly recommend them to anybody remotely interested in the dialectic of science, culture, mind.
I called my son yesterday on a fine point, and tonight he called back and cleared it up. He got an A in QM and his professor invited him to a few talks outside. I begged him to go to grad school with this prof.essor. They don't invite you to independent study and office talks, unless they see potential. Unfortunately, I helped raise a human being who wanted a life. He wanted to be happy! What a loss. Anyway he told me that big things were brewing. Something about pre-predicting the outcome of the Hiesenberg Uncertainty.
I've spent the entire day trying to understand self-adjoint operators and the skew symmetric features of Hermidian operators. Thanks for asking. What is going on is the embedding of a conjugate pair of energy and position--a 2x2 matrix in a 3x3.. The simple version is the idea of transforming a rectangle into the parallelogram and its symmetries. To map a parallelogram onto itself you have to do a rotation and a flip or a flip and rotation. The adjoint is the combo in one. Rectangle to parallelogram, then parallelogram onto itself. This is equivalent to a single transform T. Using (p) and (q) as in the Hamiltonian, you get an affine transformation. Are you snoring yet? The rectangle and the parallelogram have the same Area, which means they have the same total energy.
Now some fun stuff. Dirac was mostly interested in engineering, in the early part of his career. He determined in theory that using a centrifuge would isolate gas isotopes. He ran an experiment to prove it in Bristol or Cambridge and wrote it up in the early 1920s. This is the origin of the gas centrifuge process for separating isotopes U-235 and U-238 and the dimensionless number efficiency measure I tried to calculate since Iran was good enough to provide all the unknowns, the approximate size and speed of the centifuge and percentage of isotopes.
Egoland. I was very lucky in the big things, those that really matter. I should be happy. The horror that the world is being destroyed has become an obsession.
CG