Second Quantization and the Kepler Problem
john (baez@math.ucr.edu)
Second Quantization and the Kepler Problem
Posted by John Baez
The poet Blake wrote that you can see a world in a grain of sand. But even better, you can see a universe in an atom!
Bound states of hydrogen atom correspond to states of a massless quantum particle moving at the speed of light around the Einstein universe — a closed, static universe where space is a 3-sphere. We need to use a spin-½ particle to account for the spin of the electron. The states of the massless spin-½ particle where..