Chapter 1 - Atomic Structure and Lifetimes
Introduction
Essays on alternative pedagogic approaches
Philosophy of the Course
"Why I teach my
students things that are incorrect" S. Haan
How important are problems assignments?
Do the problems we assign describe the real world?
Why is the earth still flat in elementary physics?
Einstein - pedagogical impedence mismatch
Medieval note-taking
Physics as a "voyage of discovery"
Quotes
Historical approach?
Where to begin
The "discovery" of Italy
The nature of discovery
"Hot Hands" - Stephen Jay Gould
Statistical runs
Thinking outside the box
The first three minute quiz
Card trick
The force culture
Wilczek on forces
Responses to
Wilczek
Is physics a body of knowledge?
A scientific education in symbolic form
Nature is symmetric in space and time
What is time?
Time rates
Time exposure: A landscape-timescape
The Lumiere brothers
Stop
action
Slow-motion photography
Time-lapse photography
Reverse-action photography
Time reversal
The atomic fact (Section 1.1)
Feynman's view
Attraction and repulsion of neutral atoms
Atoms observable to all
STM
Birth, life, and death of ions
Splashdown of a photon
Einstein & Brownian motion
Einstein, Ann. Phys. Chim. 17, 549-60 (1905): Brownian motion
Einstein, Ann. Phys. 19, 289-306 (1906): Thesis
Quantum electrodynamics
Exchanged quantum model for forces
It takes a whole universe
Mach's Principle: every interaction
involves the entire universe
Electron-Positron events
Bubble chamber tracks
e-p pair creation & annihilation
One universal electron travelling reversibly in time
Feynman's Nobel recollections
Interview with Sam Ting
Positrons and the PET scan
The statistics of photons
The photon re-invents itself
Just
like SpongeBob clones himself
Bosons and ants
Einstein, Ann. Phys. Chim. 17, 891-921 (1905).
English translation
Let there be light: take the rest of the week
off!
Laplacian determinism vs probabilities (Section 1.2)
The fallacy of Laplacian Determinism
Cometary orbit
Precise measurement of time?
John Michell's prediction of the black hole
Laplace's prediction of the black hole
When was the Big Bang?
Ultimate limits: the Planck Length
Joint uncertainty in canonical quantities
Economic
Theory of Rational Expectations
Changing the legal landscape
Laplace: A life in exact science
Trajectories vs probabilities
Alternatives?
Kepler applet
Kepler's 2nd law
Circumference of an ellipse
Integral
Least action alternative to Newton's laws
Least time
Fermat's principle applet
Dynamics
Explore all paths until measurement
Interactive Java applets
Exercise
Solution
Plot
A call to action, Am.J.Phys.
71, 423 (2003)
Feynman and least action
Least action and EBK quantization
