Science Memes

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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I'm a phd chemist who does safety work for (mostly) engineers. I get a lot of "but you can do quantum physics, this should be easy".

I always reply that it's just basic maths, anyone who graduated highschool can "do" quantum physics. But I'm convinced all the people who say they can visualize whats going on are just liars. But then, that's also how I feel about FEM, so what do I know.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I don't know what high school you went to, but we sure as shit didn't cover stuff like partial differential equations and functional analysis.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well, when you get to Lie groups, it gets a lot harder. But generally I agree, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is mathematically not that hard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Single particle, one dimension, nonrelativistic QM, exactly. Making it N-particle breaks my brain and will to live.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As long as integrals, group theory and Hilbert spaces are concerned “basic math”, sure, they can do QM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I think you just have to differentiate whether you want to do mathematically rigorous QM (which gets arbitrarily hard), or just do useful calculations.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

People in every field tend to massively over estimate how easy it would be for other people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Technically, photon momentum is quantum physics, and that's p = h*f/c = h/lambda