It’s been a while. Let me finally wrap up this this series! I’ll show you how we can get the periodic table of elements from a quantum field theory of massless spin-1/2 particles. We’ve been studying the hydrogen atom using Schrödinger’s equation, but still taking the electron’s spin into account. This is more realistic than […]| Azimuth
In Part 10 we saw that, loosely speaking, the theory of a hydrogen atom is equivalent to the theory of a massless left-handed spin-½ particle in the Einstein universe—a static universe where space is a 3-sphere. Today we’ll ‘second quantize’ both of these equivalent theories and get new theories that again are equivalent. ‘Second quantization’ […]| Azimuth
The poet Blake wrote that you can see a world in a grain of sand. Today we’ll see a universe in an atom! We’ll see that states of the hydrogen atom correspond to states of a massless spin-½ particle in the Einstein universe—a closed, static universe where space is a 3-sphere. The rotational symmetries of […]| Azimuth
Today I want to make a little digression into the quaternions. We won’t need this for anything later—it’s just for fun. But it’s quite beautiful. We saw in Part 8 that if we take the spin of the electron into account, we can think of bound states of the hydrogen atom as spinor-valued functions on […]| Azimuth