Re: oh, my god, physicist are really A-holes.


Timo Nieminen wrote:
On Wed, 24 Oct 2006 mainargv@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Igor wrote:
mainargv@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
oh, my god, physicist are really A-holes.
They tell you that there are this and that particle, photons,
electrons, and other interesting corner cases.
While they could have told you, there was just this one equation,
derived from the second derivative of Maxwell's equations, that they
regularly do math tricks with. No wonder no one will give a straight
face explanation where that quantum wave function came from. Every
introductory textbook either fudge the argument to unimpenetrable depth
to tell you how you must accept the wave function as a postulate. Of
course no one understands it, because there was no argument, no
insight, just an empty framework for people to do experiments to fill
in the corner cases. Now, that's a good strategy.

QM is axiomatic. But so are many other physics theories. They start
with certain assumptions and then derive further results. And I must
add that QM is the most successful physical theory ever devised. The
bottom line holds. But if you think that there is something wrong with
one of it's fundamental axioms, just say so and explain why, instead of
implying they're all nonsense, which is pretty stupid.

All the textbooks and web resources I can find, started to fudge after
hydrogen, saying how difficult or complacated things are. You have to
make three simplications just to write down the equation for Helium,
not to mention figuring out suitable boundary conditions. I guess It's
impractical to solve for Helium by hand. Now if all the indrotductory
resources sound like this, what would you think? Would you have
confidence in the theory?

Why not? Helium is an N-body system; if you read a book on celestial
mechanics, and find out that N-body systems are very hard to solve for
N>2, would that cause you to lose confidence in classical mechanics and
Newtonian gravitation? If you read a book on classical electrodynamics,
and find that there only three analytical solutions [1], would that cause
you to lose confidence in classical electrodynamics?

I had an interesting conversation with one of my professors.

Solving quantum systems exactly came up, and I mentioned that I thought
Helium could be solved exactly. He explained that we can't solve Helium
exactly. The reasoning seemed to come down to the fact that it is a
multibody problem, which is just as unsolvable in QM as it is in
classical mechanics.

It was topical because I'm wondering *how* multi-body systems are
represented in QM.

[...]

.

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