Posts tagged Fairy Tales
Classically Quantum
That was the lecture I gave today in the course Fairy Tales. Usually I give this one in the end of the whole course since I think it demonstrates very neatly the power of theoretical physics. Technically, it is about the correspondence between the classical 1d statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics. We looked at path integrals, transfer matrix methods, and learned that a sushi roll is better be sliced before consuming 🙂
Well, that was forth lecture I gave this week. Kind of a big and pretty tiring fluctuation :(.
First lecture Fairy Tales
was about KdV equation, the spectacular advance of early Dutch science. There were many students. I was flattened with the fact that most were familiar with the Lagrangian, and variational calculations in this context. I begin to believe in progress and knowledge accumulation since I did not quite see this in former generation.
Moreover, the students were able to correctly describe the activities of a theoretical physicist. Well, I was rather inspired with this fact and has spent too much time on introduction for the sake of exact solution technology – just had time to mention it briefly.