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