January 2013
Beginner to intermediate
336 pages
5h 35m
English
Content preview from Quantum Physics For Dummies, Revised Edition
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Chapter 2
Entering the Matrix: Welcome to State Vectors
In This Chapter
Creating state vectors
Using Dirac notation for state vectors
Working with bras and kets
Understanding matrix mechanics
Getting to wave mechanics
Quantum physics isn’t just about playing around with your particle accelerator while trying not to destroy the universe. Sometimes, you get to do things that are a little more mundane, like turn lights off and on, perform a bit of calculus, or play with dice.
If you’re actually doing physics with those dice (beyond hurling them across the room), the lab director won’t even get mad at you. In quantum physics, absolute measurements are replaced by probabilities, so you may use dice to calculate the probabilities that various numbers will come up. You can then assemble those values into a vector (single-column matrix) in Hilbert space (a type of infinitely dimensional vector space with some properties that are especially valuable in quantum physics).
This chapter introduces ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.