2 - Quantum mechanics, classical, and special relativity

Summary

Fundamentals of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics remains one of the most successful, yet enigmatic, formulations of physics. Uncertainty and measurement constraints are incorporated at the core of this fundamental description of micro-physical dynamics. Quantum mechanics successfully describes the observed structures in chemistry and materials science. In particular, the impenetrability of matter due to Pauli exclusion is a consequence of incorporating special relativity into quantum mechanics. Microscopic causality, or the requirement that communications cannot propagate at greater than the speed of light, relates a particle's spin to its quantum statistics but does not exclude the space-like correlations associated with a coherent quantum state.

This section will examine some of the foundations of quantum physics. An emphasis will be placed upon how the microscopic fundamentals of quantum mechanics relate to the geometric fundamentals of gravitational mechanics.

Quantum formalism

There are several interpretations of quantum mechanics offering models of the underlying (often hidden) dynamics that generate the observed quantum phenomenology (for example, the Copenhagen interpretation, or the many-worlds interpretation). Since any interpretation consistent with quantum physics cannot be proved or disproved by experiment, only those aspects of quantum formalism directly connected to experimental observables will be developed, with minimal interpretation imposed. To establish the conventions utilized in what follows, a brief overview of the formalism that describes those calculable observables modeled by quantum physics will be given.