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Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics

academia.edu

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Re: Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics

#3
so many threads on hacker news get voted to the top without any comments at all. usually you're supposed to read the article, but in this case i doubt anyone is really capable of understanding it. so in conclusion, aside from this one the article has the appropriate number of comments.

Re: Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics

#6
post #3

so many threads on hacker news get voted to the top without any comments at all. usually you're supposed to read the article, but in this case i doubt anyone is really capable of understanding it. so in conclusion, aside from this one the article has the appropriate number of comments.

this is all very standard stuff for a physicist. Any first or second year grad student should have an easy time digesting this.

Re: Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics

#9
post #2

There's nothing like looking at that Table of Contents to put your own PhD in perspective!

Indeed, although some of this is the luck of timing. E.g. Richard Feynman would likely have been one of the great names in quantum mechanics ... if it weren't for the fact he was 8 years old right then. Linus Pauling, born 17 years earlier, became the 20th century's most preeminent chemist in part because he was a fricking genius and writer (many of his books are still useful today), but key was that also in 1926 he got a Guggenheim Fellowship to study under some European physicists like Bohr and Schrödinger for a couple of years, and was therefore one of the first to apply quantum mechanics to chemistry, a very fruitful approach.

Re: Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics

#10
post #6
post #3

so many threads on hacker news get voted to the top without any comments at all. usually you're supposed to read the article, but in this case i doubt anyone is really capable of understanding it. so in conclusion, aside from this one the article has the appropriate number of comments.

this is all very standard stuff for a physicist. Any first or second year grad student should have an easy time digesting this.

"Pshaw, even the most dimwitted individual should understand this, provided they have a BS in physics, were accepted to grad school, and are in their first or second year."
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