Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Foundations, 1, David Peak

Foundations

Quantum mechanics is money

Text message and take a picture with your smart phone; watch a movie on your Blu-ray player; get the bar code on your bag of chips scanned; obtain an MRI image of your aching shoulder; take a ride on a maglev train. None of these—and countless other—things would be possible without quantum mechanics! Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, is widely quoted as saying that 1/3 of the world’s economy is due to quantum mechanics. Lederman’s estimate is actually probably too low, but what surely is the case is that computers, lasers, and superconducting magnets (to …

Foundations, 3, David Peak

Foundations

Our goal is to try to reconcile classical EM with the existence of photons. The electric and magnetic fields associated with EM radiation, propagating in the x -direction, obey the Maxwell wave equation: ∂²E/∂t² = c²(∂²E/∂x²).

Foundations, 2, David Peak

Foundations

The double slit experiment in dim light – photons!

Let’s imagine doing the double slit experiment again, but now in very dim light. To do so requires putting the laser, plate, and collector in a sealed, light-tight box. Inserting neutral density filters in the beam between the laser and the double slit plate decreases the intensity of the beam striking the plate. In fact, the experiment can be done at such a low intensity that a human eye will not see any light on the CCD collector; but the CCD can. Under these conditions, the number of pixels that “light …