The Road to Quantum Mechanics: 2022 Review
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It’s been a crazy year, but we covered a lot of ground in this series.
About a year ago, I published the first article in my series The Road to Quantum Mechanics and it was a smash hit. It is my second most successful article that I’ve ever published. While I have had one-off successes before, this series has been a source of continuous growth. While I am proud of what I have written, hindsight is 20-20. As I look back at the series, I can see some weaknesses of the series as a whole. In this article, I want to go back through the series with a fresh pair of eyes and fix some of those weaknesses. I also want to discuss future plans for the series, goals, time frames, etc.
The Main Goal of the Series
The main goal of The Road to Quantum Mechanics is to cover most of the Math needed to do Quantum Mechanics and most of the Physics that led to Quantum Mechanics. Covering all this material is less difficult than it seems because so much of Quantum Mechanics shows up in Classical Mechanics with some slight tweaks. If I’ve done my job right, you should be able to jump into many resources on Quantum Mechanics without any trouble at all.
Goals of the Sequel Series
Although The Road to Quantum Mechanics will end once we get to Quantum Mechanics, I plan to start writing a sequel series where we talk about Quantum Mechanics. Think of it like how some TV shows have parts that have different names, such as Star Trek vs Star Trek: The Next Generation, Archer vs Archer: Vice, or Dragonball vs Dragonball Z. There are a few reasons for why I’m doing this, but I just want a clean break I can exploit. Anyway, the goals of the second series are less abstract. I want to be able to
- discuss the experiments that led to Quantum Mechanics,
- explain the emission lines of Hydrogen and other atoms,
- predict decay rates of various isotopes,
- predict all the physical properties of various materials (e.g. conductivity of copper metal),
- come up with a Physical model for electrical devices such as diodes and transistors that I can use to make predictions,
- write out a mathematical model for…
