## Thursday, March 26, 2009

### A new blog

I have started a new blog called Behind the Guesses.  It is by and large a physics / math blog, so I imagine only a subset of our normal readers might find it interesting.  At the moment I only have an intro post, but I have an exciting post all ready for Monday, so check back then.
Here's a small preview of some topics you can expect to see:
• The Quantum Harmonic Oscillator Ladder Operators
• Newton's Laws
• The Dot and Cross Products
• And more...
And here's an excerpt of Monday's post as a sneak preview:
Now, at this point, many texts define, with no motivation other than future ``convenience'', two operators

$a \equiv (x+ip)/\sqrt{2}$
(5a)
$a^\dag \equiv (x-ip)/\sqrt{2}$
(5b)
and proceed to show how these can be used to simplify the Hamiltonian and easily solve the problem. While it is an elegant and quick solution, this presentation is completely useless. I find it highly unlikely that Dirac sat down to solve this problem and tried a whole series of random operators
$c \equiv (x^2+ip)/7$
$d \equiv (x^p-e^{ip})/\pi$
$f \equiv (\sqrt{x}e^{-x^2/8}+ip^3)/\sqrt\pi$
$g &\equiv (\sqrt{x p}-ip/x)/3$
and so on, along with their complex conjugates, until he lucked out with the solution in (5)...
See you all there!

#### 1 comment:

1. "It is by and large a physics / math blog, so I imagine only a subset of our normal readers might find it interesting"

That has got to be the lousiest math pun yet.