Home Propeller Head Plaza

Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

  Register / Login

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]
[ Alert Moderator ]

When I was in graduate school...

...in my advanced quantum mechanics course, my classmates and I used Feynmann diagrams and some very complex math to compute the anomolous magnetic moment of the electron using QED techniques. At this point I'd had about 8 years of training in math and theoretical physics. Of course this had been done already several decades before, and was in all the books. I had access to all the original papers and was free to consult my classmates, and my professor during office hours (as well as any books I might find helpful from the well-stocked math-physics library. The prof also lectured on the topic twice a week during that time.

I remember doing pretty much nothing else for a whole week--maybe two. In the end I got it, and it was an amazing experience. Sure, this is QED 101, but it was a thrill to reproduce this elegant bit of science. But it was one of the hardest things I can remember doing in physics graduate school. Really intense. Picture integrals three lines long where every symbol represents some other expression that is itself a line or two long. That's a lot to keep track of. And in the end you get nothing but a number, even if it's a pretty important number. And during this time I never had the experience of communing with electrons or whatever the hell this Web site is talking about.

Would someone please tell me what extroardinarily talented scientist did the work referred to on the Belt site? I know that it surpassed Feynmann, and my grad-school QM prof didn't mention it. I've looked through my books (Landau and Lifshitz, Merzbacher (who taught me QM in grad school), a few others) and couldn't find anything about it. But maybe it's just too new to be in the books yet. Still, there ought to be some juicy papers to read in Science (my current employer; pretty sure I haven't seen anything there) or at least in Physical Review Letters. Maybe that's where it was.

Hey, would someone send me a link to the relevant literature?

This kind of bullshit infuriates me. Charles is this the kind of stuff you're trying to defend?

Jim Austin

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.  

Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
You can not post to an archived thread.

[ Top Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]