4:28 AM
He is trying to give too much physical interpretation to the various components of the wavefunction. The phase of the wavefunction (which is usually where the complex part is at play) basically only affects what energy levels the molecule has. In the molecular orbital picture, we can treat the wavefunction as made up of many molecular orbitals interfering with each other. The magnetic properties of the molecule meanwhile depends on the whole wave function, not just the complex part as the author claimed

Yeah

Finally, I really won't consider mass and energy as conjugates, as what he tried to claim with $E=mc^2$
though they can be lumped into a covariant quantity called the 4-momentum

Agreed
There’s a lot there that just seems off
Devolves into gobbledygook pretty fast

The last line can probably be explained by how our brains like to base our thinking on things we are familiar with and extrapolate from it. It is how we get from simple theorems to more general cases by modelling it using the simpler cases
The commonality between wave particle duality, energy and momentum, electric and magnetic fields, is that they all are dependent pairs of concepts, thus the temptation to get them related is easy

I guess
As a mode of poetry, I don’t mind it

4:37 AM
This phenomenon is particularly common in religious, esoteric and magical communities (though I might actually need to spend some time to dig up a sociology paper on belief attitudes someday to support my point here) it is the basis of how the concept of "family resemblance" lead to magical thinking, thus eventually leading to the cosmology in those circles that everything all stems from some same underlying thing

But as a note in the “Journal of Chemical Education”, it’s rather WTF

Myself is also guilty of that kind of slippage, which is why having some physics knowledge and a physics community to keep track of my thinking can be helpful when the mind tries to take shortcuts on nonintuitive concepts.
On the other hand, it makes me extremely creative in problem solving
And yeah, sometimes, crackpot level material do slip through into legitimate journals, and is quite common especially in the past since we don't understood as much

I have no idea what the standard for that journal is
So it’s hard to make any guesses

It's significant, given the large number of papers on it, and is part of ACS (hence have to have some quality assurance). I sometimes saw experiments on chemical education published there. But if my memory serves, it is not the most prestigious of the chemical education journals

Gotcha

4:43 AM
I forgot the name of the most popular since I am not in that field and only catch up with that knowledge by interacting with my collegues
::::::::::
As for the ontology of the wavefunction, if one insists to give one for it, I think most people nowadays will probably say it is really information. But accepting that ontology will end up with some pretty strange philosophical consequences such as it will imply everything in our world is made up of information, and not only that, that somehow by measuring it, you get something physical from it. (and if the maths is over interpreted, then you have this bizarre "why" problem
on why linear operations on this information somehow give you values of physical quantities
While information does has some kind of physical nature that we still don't understood as shown by a paper that used mutual information in entangled states to cool a quantum wire (to be dug) and also to use measurement to control a cooling engine:
It is still a bit early to say that everything, field and energy-momentum is really information.

5:04 AM
Also an unrelated article stumbled upon when googling for the above:
It basically say that to cool something, you can do it more literally by exploiting the chemical potential of a material so that infrared photons preferentially tunnel away to the material and hence drawing heat away

1 hour later…
6:20 AM
I don't like my Facebook posts to be arbitrarily liked.
I prefer my scientific posts to be given knowledgeable comment than being innocently liked.

6:52 AM
Hello everyone! Is the h bar accessible from the app?
If so, how?

@MauroGiliberti I get the impression the app has been abandoned. Just use the browser. The mobile site has been optimised for phones.

7:33 AM
That's unfortunate. Thanks!

7:51 AM
@JohnRennie I have a question

@Akash.B hi :-)
What's the question?

@JohnRennie I once asked you a question
about a ball kept on the surface of earth

@Akash.B yes, I remember

@JohnRennie if we keep the ball on an inclined surface ,it rolls

Yes

7:54 AM
is there any external force applied on it?

Yes, the external force is the gravitational field of the Earth.

@JohnRennie the direction of gravitational field is downwards ,right?
then how can the ball move towards the side?
@JohnRennie

Let me draw a quick diagram:

@JohnRennie yeah go on

Suppose we put the ball on a perfectly horizontal surface like this:
Gravity exerts a downwards force $mg$ on the ball. The surface exerts a normal force upwards on the ball.

8:06 AM
@JohnRennie okay

The two forces are exactly lined up so they cancel each other out and there is no net force on the ball. So the ball doesn't move.
But now let's draw the ball on an incline:
Gravity (the blue arrow) always acts straight down, and the normal force (red arrow) acts normal to the surface. So when the surface is not horizontal the two forces are not lined up and they don't cancel.

@JohnRennie oh

When you add up the two forces they partially cancel but not completely. So you're left with a force pointing down the slope. That's why the ball moves down the slope.

@JohnRennie so doesn't the surface of earth exert a force?
isn't the surface of earth curved?

Because if we assume the Earth is a perfect sphere then at every point on the surface the surface is locally perfectly horizontal.

8:12 AM
@JohnRennie how's it possible ?
is it an illusion?

Consider the point at the top in my diagram. Gravity always points towards the centre of the Earth so the gravity points straight down.
At the point at the top the angle of the ground is the tangent to the sphere, which I've drawn as the dashed line. The normal force is normal to this line.
The dashed line is horizontal so the normal force (red arrow) points straight up i.e. exactly opposite to gravity (blue arrow) pointing straight down.

@JohnRennie oh

So the two forces exactly line up and cancel each other out.

so its perpendicular

Yes

8:22 AM
@JohnRennie is the ball really siting on a horizontal surface?
ahh this question makes my head ache

They got the length contraction wrong (it would be Terrell rotated) but we can't have everything :-)

2 hours later…
10:47 AM
lol at that diagram

2 hours later…
12:37 PM
0

I asked this as a soft question How to explore Physics research as an undergraduate, keeping in mind the ever increasing weightage on publications? I have explictly asked if this is the right place to post this and if not please suggest an alternative. One of the contributors suggested "Academia...

@JohnRennie terrell rotation?

1 hour later…
2:00 PM
Simplest version is this: suppose you were to fly past a spherical object at relativistic speed
You might expect to see length contraction, ie the sphere would appear to be compressed along the direction of your motion
But actually you’d still see a spherical object. The surface of said sphere would look different, but the overall shape in that case wouldn’t

2 hours later…
4:28 PM
@Semiclassical did you see this? so far bohmian mechanics hasnt been linked to QM scarring but suspect its just a matter of time. Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator nature.com/articles/nature24622 while not in abstract this paper is linkked to scarring in this article

hmm
but that bit on quantum chaos is one where a Bohmian perspective could be useful
that's a good article
reminds me of nothing so much as
In quantum mechanics, the quantum revival is a periodic recurrence of the quantum wave function from its original form during the time evolution either many times in space as the multiple scaled fractions in the form of the initial wave function (fractional revival) or approximately or exactly to its original form from the beginning (full revival). The quantum wave function periodic in time exhibits therefore the full revival every period. The phenomenon of revivals is most readily observable for the wave functions being well localized wave packets at the beginning of the time evolution for...
but that reflects a case where the energy levels are rational
which seems strange to expect in this context

@Semiclassical am having trouble following the nature article from just the abstract vs the popsci writeup. Bernien et al say its a simulator but Woo writes about it as if its a physical experiment. anyway my vague handwaving idea is that pilot waves could be linked to scarring somehow.

4:44 PM
well, note that if what they're doing is a simulation, then it's already incorporating QM
so it won't be a scenario where BM says one thing experimentally and QM says something else experimentally
that said, it'd be interesting if the Bohmian formulation of the story is more intuitive etc

@Semiclassical to me simulation typically refers to software/ algorithm(s). but maybe here term is used in the sense that an artificial/ contrived but real atomic arrangement can in a sense simulate other types of interactions.

my read so far is that it's based on numerical/analytical calculations
but i can't quite figure that out either
I think the point is that the Turner et al is numerical/analytical
whereas the Bernien paper is about an actual experimental ssystem

its cutting edge stuff and can see they are themselves maybe struggling somewhat with new vocabulary/ concepts etc., prob half my confusion would be cleared by reading the article. only $9 o_O which paper? the Bernien paper is on arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/1707.04344 How does BM explain the whole instability of atoms thing, the whole electrons radiating all their energy almost immediately (Larmor) The Larmor formula is used to calculate the total power radiated by a non relativistic point charge as it accelerates or decelerates. This is used in the branch of physics known as electrodynamics and is not to be confused with the Larmor precession from classical nuclear magnetic resonance. It was first derived by J. J. Larmor in 1897, in the context of the wave theory of light. When any charged particle (such as an electron, a proton, or an ion) accelerates, it radiates away energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. For velocities that are small relative to the speed of light, the total... 4:54 PM @Semiclassical (thx!) Bernien Nature 2017 doesnt even use word "scar" in abstract. @vzn yeah, the Turner et al paper seems to be where that's introduced "A classical electron orbiting a nucleus experiences acceleration and should radiate. Consequently, the electron loses energy and the electron should eventually spiral into the nucleus. Atoms, according to classical mechanics, are consequently unstable. This classical prediction is violated by the observation of stable electron orbits. The problem is resolved with a quantum mechanical description of atomic physics, initially provided by the Bohr model. " @Semiclassical just searched paper and scar is not inside it either. @vzn arxiv.org/abs/1711.03528 is what I have in mind it was maybe feynman who introduced idea that a QC is much like a quantum simulator or can be utilized as such. 4:58 PM @bolbteppa my naive guess would be that, in the bohmian story, the electron doesn't radiate hmm @bolbteppa @Semiclassical since youre both here had a proposition. re your recent conversations about QM vs classical systems analogies. wanted to start a longterm investigation along these lines. think it is in line with your bkg/ interests/ questions/ talents. however feel it could only be carried out "elsewhere" in some other (chat) room. Seems like the true path which actually exists but that we can't observe would have to not radiate energy continuously for some reason but reduce to a theory where paths now exist which do radiate energy yeah, the issue is not so much "why doesn't an electron radiate in this situation" but "why would it radiate in some contexts but not others" @vzn you can discuss such things here as we have been doing for a while now periodically I'm rather disturbed by the fact that I"m not seeing a discussion in the literature of it 5:05 PM One weird thing is this was dealt with before QFT was even developed properly yeah this is why I say that, within the context it was developed in, the Bohmian story is internally consistent but "internally consistent" and "satisfactory" are not the same thing I think this is one of the stronger arguments for needing QM too @Semiclassical as you know I completely disagree it is even legitimate let alone consistent :p yeah, well, that's like, your opinion man this argument about larmor radiation does bother me tho I bet one could copy the standard QM Bohr thing to deal with Larmor I'm not so bothered by the lack of Larmor radiation for an electron in orbit around an atom---it's easy enough to say "larmor radiation is a property of classical charged particles, not of Bohmian charged particles" but that line of reasoning doesn't really work, since there are certainly cases where we do talk about larmor radiation from electrons 5:11 PM I don't think there really is a "problem" as such with the radiation: Standard QM also essentially waves a magic wand and says "classical ideas of radiation are invalid here", so BM may do so, too. However, this seems to hurt the Bohmian metaphysics much more, since it makes evident that the "classicality" of the paths taken by the guided particles is questionable. if I was to guess, the out is that when you observe larmor radiation from electrons you're really talking about a collective phenomenon rather than that of a single particle @bolbteppa what is your obj to another room? But I'm not sure. In particular, QM has not much of an issue if it says that both classical paths and Larmor radiation emerge only in its classical limits. But it is harder to see how BM is going to argue that while it had classical paths for the particles all along, Larmor radiation only emerges in the classical limit. To argue this, you'd need a full Bohmian description of how the EM field couples to charged particles. yeah 5:14 PM @bolbteppa there is a classical experiment that nobodys done, suspect it will reveal electron orbits as an emergent property of a fairly straightfwd wave + interacting particle system. similar to the Couder-Bush oildrop experiments. undergraduates could potentially carry it out. @ACuriousMind yeah I mean, that's not so bad in certain respects If you can write down the appropriate wave equation, then getting the Bohmian story out of that is doable But I'm always a bit anxious when it comes to electromagnetism, since that's wrapped up with special relativity and BM definitely has issues there Not going to lie, this does bother me Basically paths exist in BM, and the claim is that non-relativistic classical mechanics just doesn't apply to them, fine, so clearly relativistic mechanics isn't going to apply to them either, and electromagnetism is the interaction of relativistic particles with (relativistic) EM Fields, so there is no reason to expect the particles following those hidden paths satisfy any classical theories... But here the claim is we are measuring systems which move along continuous paths which reduce to a theory of a different set of continuous paths now predicting the instability of matter only when our measurements are less and less accurate, i.e. we go from a theory predicting stability of matter to instability of matter depending on our level of measurement accuracy, waving my hands I can pretend it's like some Taylor approximation to see it :p, but it's not pleasant It's definitely something which somebody should have talked about in the literature but I'm not seeing that so far, and that doesn't sit well with me at all It seems they were able to partially resolve this (Bohr model) before QM (let alone QFT) was even fully developed because QFT seamlessly reduces to QM in the non-relativistic limit which is kind of nuts given how bizarre QFT is @vzn what is your objection to talking about physics theories in the physics chat :p I really can't get over how shocking it is that simply changing the group (i.e. working with the Galilean subgroup of Poincare instead of Poincare) leads to such huge problems, you could analyze the issues with BM using cohomology (group extension) theory :p 5:29 PM @bolbteppa will explain at length elsewhere but so many in here seem to be allergic to leaving this room, its apparently like a security blanket for some o_O Of course going from a subgroup to the larger group does in general lead to madness, but the physics tames the bigger group to be related to the subgroup in a manageable way, the way we get from QM to QFT, so it shouldn't cause such big issues for BM which should be a real motivation for relativistic BM'ers holy @#%& stop the presses missed this just found this randomly googling, am in a bit of shock, couder-bush electron slit experiment supposedly debunked (late 2018). these are fighting words lolFamous Experiment Dooms Alternative to Quantum Weirdness quantamagazine.org/… (and cohomologists :p) > After perfecting their experimental setups, getting rid of air currents, and setting oil droplets bouncing on pilot waves toward two slits, none of the teams saw the interference-like pattern reported by Couder and Fort. Droplets went through the slits in almost straight lines, and no stripes appeared. The French pair’s earlier mistake is now attributed to noise, faulty methodology and insufficient statistics. yikes I mean, I object to saying that that "dooms" Bohmian mechanics. It just means that this supposed experimental analogue is not valid But if it's true, it makes me very annoyed at Couder et al 5:37 PM feel this supposed debunking must be bogus on some level. think the correct interpretation is that they simply have a different experimental setup and didnt isolate the exact differences. expect a counter-rebuttal from Couder-Fort or et al... :| It's worth remembering that the Couder et al analogy was not intended to show that BM is right and QM is wrong if anything, it was to argue that both were wrong and there's some fast time-scale dynamics with pilot wave emerging when you look at moderate times and QM when you look at long times (that's a gloss of course) @Semiclassical the intentions have changed over time. the original intention was just purely experimental investigation. aka curiosity/ no agenda/ shoshin "beginners mind". there was never any double slit prediction. it was an idea they tried out after trying earlier simpler experiments. afaik original experiments were not even motivated by BM at all. etc So if the experimental results hold up, I'd say it undermines the idea that short-time scale dynamics are a credible explanation @vzn true enough, but that's the story they got out of it they may not have come to the experiment with that story, but that's the story they tell when discussing that experiment there are different stories and they dont line up yet. dont think this is the final verdict at all. think it only shows how subtle and tricky it can be to study emergent dynamics. think not all the variables are being correctly controlled/ isolated yet. the following paragraph from one of T.Bohr's papers is pertinent to the point I"m making 5:47 PM "Classically, the electron should fall in. Charged particles emit Larmor radiation when they accelerate, so classically the electron radiates as it orbits and fall into the nucleus. This is a huge part of why we developed QM, it was known very well right away that there were serious foundational problems either with the Rutherford model or with electromagnetism. Gravitational orbits, in the strictest sense, really shouldn't be possible either, since an accelerating mass emits gravitational waves for the same reason that a charged particle emits EM. However, due to the energy scales involve "In the work of de Broglie a theoretical picture is presented, which is surprisingly close to the experiments on walkers. In his double solution theory, de Broglie proposes that, aside from the Schrodinger wave function, which only has statistical significance and thus is normalized, there might be a “real” wave, which acts like a guiding wave for a “real” particle, while the particle is responsible for exciting the wave [21]. This picture is very different from Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, where one solves the Schrodinger equation for the problem at hand and then lets the pa I wonder if gravitational waves are ever factored into the whole moon coming closer to the earth thing Nobel prize winning idea right here So I think T. Bohr's read on the situation would be that their experiments cast doubt on de Broglie's double-solution approach, while leaving the Bohm interpretation in the same place as it was (i.e., an interpretation of the physical predictions, not a modification of such) 6:02 PM "It explains how Bohmian particles need not radiate electromagnetically. It makes an experimentally testable prediction involving bremsstrahlung as well [19]" "It is shown that the hydrodynamic interpretation of a charged quantum particle leads to a different theoretical prediction for low energy bremsstrahlung than does quantum electrodynamics (QED). In the calculations, the electromagnetic fields are treated classically in the hydrodynamic case, but are quantized in QED. " Conflicts with QED though I'd be suspicious of equating a hydrodynamic interpretation with the Bohm interpretation for rather the same reasons as the paragraph I cited I think it's worth remembering that the Bohm interpretation is pretty minimal in its original context. the schrodinger equation dictates the time evolution of a given wavefunction, and that wavefunction tells the particle what trajectories are allowed you can add additional stuff to that, and that's how I'd view hydrodynamic stuff But I'm overall rather dissatisfied by my inability to find a discussion of this by people I trusst 6:30 PM @bolbteppa hydrodynamic formulas must be mere approximations of a complex phenomena. so think its not so so accurate to refer to "calculations". as have long advocated what is needed are simulations... "must" [needs citation] but generally agree that the hydrodynamic model might make some different predictions than QED in extreme cases. @Semiclassical this is a basic concept in fluid dynamics. many formulas used in it are understood to be approximations. eg think Navier-Stokes etc @ACuriousMind one partial objection here: While BM does have classical paths, it doesn't have Newtonian mechanics save in the classical limit that's a statement of how they arise in those systems, yes doesn't mean that, if a hydrodynamic-looking formula shows up, that it must have that origin I think it's credible to say that their appearance suggests a "approximation to complex phenomena" interpretation but I don't think it's logically sound to say that it demands it @ACuriousMind a partial objection to this: While Bohmian particles do have classical paths (in the sense that you suppose that position as a function of time makes sense) it doesn't have Newtonian dynamics so while Bohmian mechanics doesn't need to invoke the classical limit to get paths, it does need to do so if it wants to recover Newtonian mechanics so I don't think it's quite so bad for BM. But it does bother me @Semiclassical not an expert on this but eg navier stokes has key assumptions about viscosity and compressibility that are locally reasonable but break down with eg turbulent flow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations the general idea of comparison of hydrodynamics with QED is great, highly endorse it, but think the predictions of both are extremely complex to compare in detail and that any such projects must be regarded as tentative and not definitive aka work-in-progress. I'm not trying to say that a hydrodynamic interpretation of QED is absurd on the face of it, to be clear. (I can't say I'm terribly fond of it, but that's another matter.) But I hardly think that QED must be hydrodynamic 6:42 PM @Semiclassical the paper is a clearcut case of the fluid paradigm slowly "emerging" as a research program but then trying to reject/ refute/ rule out it early on. think its a decades-long prj at the minimum. could be. could not be until it actually does emerge, you're not in a position to draw that conclusion @Semiclassical (lol!) ("expert") surfers can judge the emergence of waves :P expert surfers, yes @Semiclassical the signs of its emergence are everywhere, its still building into critical mass, just looking at last few hrs of chat transcript is littered with aspects/ leads. its a very slow building wave. @Semiclassical I don't think we need to defer to Lisi on this ;P 6:51 PM @ACuriousMind Going back to the earlier point, I wonder what the simplest treatment possible is in order to have a single quantum-mechanical particle which produces Larmor radiation @Semiclassical Neglecting quantum corrections to the Larmor formula itself, you just need a non-stationary state whose expectation value for the time-derivative of momentum (the "acceleration") is non-zero, no? sounds right I mean, at its core, the reason why the energy states of electrons in an atom don't radiate is that they are stationary states, right? Of course, anything using the Larmor formula will necessarily be semi-classical in the sense that it does not quantize the EM field, but I guess this is appropriate given your username ;) 6:56 PM lol that's a good way to put it, yeah one is looking for a semiclassical treatment of Larmor radiation my intuition would be that, if you try to do this with the free Schrodinger equation, you won't succeed and that you'll need to do something more extreme, such as introduce a nonlinearity into your wave equation @Semiclassical No solution to the time-independent Schrödinger equation will ever radiate, regardless of the system. yeah If you want an example, this is just an exercise in finding an initial state such that the expectation value of acceleration is non-zero for the evolved state. You won't find this for the free equation indeed, because all the momenta spread out in the same fashion. right Although... What about a travelling wavepacket, but in momentum space? 7:02 PM Hmm What would a travelling Gaussian wavepacket in momentum space look like in position space? and could you have that in the absence of a potential? i mean, the free Schrodinger equation in momentum space would be$(p^2/2m)\tilde{\Psi}(p,t) = i\hbar \partial_t \tilde{\Psi}$Probably not. After all, the Hamiltionian is$p^2$, making the situation asymmetric between position and momentum Right an interesting case might be a particle in a harmonic potential in that case you can prepare a coherent state and have it oscillate in both position and momentum space should work yeah and should be tractable though, the expectation value for dp/dt should still be governed by Ehrenfest and that'd seemingly preclude getting anything for <dp/dt> besides the usual force from the potential energy @Semiclassical Ehrenfest says that for d/dt <p>, not <dp/dt>. 7:08 PM hmm, true Though that latter expression is problematic since it only makes sense in the Heisenberg picture the two expressions shouldn't be different, the former is Schrödinger, the latter is Heisenberg right Ah! The catch is that Ehrenfest says that that expression is equal to the Expectation value of the (derivative of the) potential, not the potential oh, true so you don't get the "usual force" Otherwise this would be an argument that the stationary states in an electron radiate :P 7:11 PM hah yeah I dunno. I feel like we'd need to invoke something more than just the one-particle Schrodinger equation in order to get radiation @Semiclassical Why? We don't have to invoke anything more than a single classical particle path to get radiation, either! (+Larmor formula, in both cases) (I'm a bit distracted; I'm only applying half brainpower to this train of thoughts because I'm rewatching Trek's TNG after about a decade since I last watched it and it's very interesting how different it is from what I remember) lol my impulse, i guess, would be to replace a single particle with a many-particle "lump" of such particles with the idea being that, for a macroscopic particle, you certainly should see radiation @Semiclassical But the classical limit is not "many quantum particles", so why do you want to do that? 7:21 PM yeah, that doesn't really hold up does it The same sort of reasoning would suggest that quantum condensed matter theory shouldn't be a distinct field of study ;) 7:42 PM lol, this TNG episode just used Fermat's theorem as an example for a puzzle we may never solve. (It was written before Wiles' proof) Ah, the Royale funnily, they made a reference in DS9 to retcon that Truly the most important plothole Quite 8:15 PM Can't find anything on QM corrections to Larmor in my normal sources anyway, lots of other EM things have QFT analogues @vzn QED is probably the most successful theory in history right, different results to that are clearly a big issue Yeah. If you’re going to have a story about something underlying QED, your story had better explain why QED nevertheless works so well @bolbteppa One issue I see is that you won't get any Larmor effects from a scattering-like treatment. I suppose the QFT corrections, if any, are not easily computed because you have to have control over the full evolution of the state, not just the asymptotic past/futire @ACuriousMind was literally just thinking that, you do get things like Rayleigh and Mie scattering analogues and was thinking ahh In that vein 2 Classical electromagnetism says an accelerated charge would radiate. Is this understood in QED? Is there QED derivation of Larmor's formula? I'm not sure though, it seems like you could get something along the lines of Larmor One can look at relativistic electrons in external fields for which first order processes of emission and absorption can occur and in a sense it'd just be that so I'm not sure 8:28 PM A major gap in my understanding, I should note @Semiclassical The answer there is semi-classical in exactly the opposite way that we were before - it treats the EM field as quantized but not the charged current. Yeah, which is interesting This may be a sign that asking for something like the Larmor formula in a fully quantum theory doesn't really make sense My recollection of QFT is weak, and my knowledge of Bohmian attempts at field theory even more so When you neither have straightforward radiation to emit (but photons) nor something that possesses a straightforward acceleration (but instead a nebulous quantum state), what exactly would we expect such a fully-quantum Larmor formula to apply to? 8:31 PM if you need to go to field theory to get a story for quantum Larmlr formula, then my expertise pretty much guarantees I can’t say much In the end, the semi-classical treatments are only insufficient if we can construct an actual situation where they fail I think you could only get a Larmor formula analogue by including an external field Radiation like this would be like emission or absorption which is first order which is banned in QED proper (without an external field) It’s a reasonable hypothesis @bolbteppa fair enough But I'm kind of shocked the power distribution formula has no direct QM analogue 8:45 PM I'm confused with entanglement measure. Since entanglement measures are LOCC invariants, then why local actions cause entanglement degradation Found it!!! Or we say, the thing that measures something changes has not to change? Eq. 45.8 of Landau vol 4 Dipole radiation in an external field gives the distribution @bolbteppa the closest approach I’ve seen is this paper: aflb.ensmp.fr/AFLB-303/aflb303m305.pdf Oh nice One thing I wonder about is calling this stuff fundamental, because you are using an external field and so approximations, but at the same time you're using wave functions solved in that external field which is considered weak, is it like saying emission and absorption are like fake processes to say this isn't fundamental... 8:56 PM @bolbteppa "Emission" and "absorption" are not "fundamental" because they are discrete processes: When we say that X "emits" something, we're always thinking about a process where, in one moment, X is in an excited state, and one moment later, X has emitted something and is now in a lower state. But that's not how "real" processes work, there's always a messy intermediate state in whose asymptotic past you find the excited state of X and in whose asymptotic future you find the lower state of X and that something which it has "emitted". That messy intermediate state does not lend itself to identify a discrete moment in time where the single entity X splits into another state of the entity X and the emitted thing. I kind of get what you mean I think :p One thing I will say is this derivation looks simpler than the effort involved in going from the Lienard-Weichert potential to the EM field (which is just like taking derivatives :p) It's the same with generic scattering. But there the messiness is confounded by people taking Feynman diagrams too literally and thinking the vertices in the diagram are "where/when the magic happens". 'the messiness' seems to be this integral$\hat{V}_{fi}(t) = e \int \hat{j}_{fi} A d^3 x\$ or it's conjugate

Without knowing what exactly the symbols there are, I'm gonna say yes because that looks like an interaction, and the asymptotic future/past are exactly the places where we turn the interaction off to be able to identify free particles again.

So all the matter you see around you, you would say is just a collection of instantaneous free particle asymptotic qft interactions occurring all the time :p

9:08 PM
Most of the matter around me doesn't seem to consist of free particles

There is a lot of bound state stuff in QCD which I really don't know how to square with the whole 'free particle scattering processes are all we can do in qft' thing

Condensed matter probably has much more to say about that "real world matter" than the type of QFT I'm familiar with

3 hours later…
11:49 PM
Just pooped out some symetries in a condensed matter system then slung out some code. Currently at the beach listening to migos while gulping sparkiling water and walking. Great things are coming I swear provided it all works out. Hehe
Some errors, . . . corresponding via phone
Was going to upload a photo but might not have that capability now.