Presentation: Quantum Electrodynamics

The World of Math

Some people think math is just something teachers came up with to keep kids busy - but that’s not true. When you go to the grocery store and add up all the prices of the items you buy to find the total price, you’re doing math. People also use math when they are keeping track of something, like how many pages you read in a day. You can record these things on a coordinate grid. Next time you do something like this, remember you are using math.

The Language God Talks

Calculus is the most amazing thing I have studied - it’s the language god talks. It is the study of continuous change. Calculus brings many wonders to life. If there was no calculus, there wouldn’t be cell phones, computers, television, or whatever you are reading this on. Whether you are a high schooler going into college, an adult learning new things, or someone else, you should definitely try calculus.

Physics Here and Physics There

Physics is the science of nature. It describes how motion and gravity work, and how everything around us work together to create the universe. Physicists are still working hard to learn more about this. In order to fully understand nature, we must first unify its fundamental forces into a unified field theory. This is the part we are stuck on. To conclude, physics is much bigger than you think - only a small part of the true universe has been discovered so far.

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a vast part of physics that has been studied for over a hundred years. It describes how particles, like electrons, act like waves. That is called the wave-particle duality which was also described by Thomas Young’s double-slit experiment in the 1800s. Another big development of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, $\Delta x \Delta p \ge \frac{\hbar}{2}$. It states that you can’t know both, the position of a particle and it’s momentum at the same time.

A Game of Chess

I like to think of nature as the gods playing a game of chess. We don’t know the rules of the game or how it works. All we do is observe the game. Of course after some time, we will eventually learn some of the rules ourselves such as how a rook moves. We have found out some of nature’s laws over the years such as quantum mechanics. This shows that we can’t just know everything when we are born - we have to slowly learn it.

Example from Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman