Speaker
Description
As we approach the 100th anniversary of Heisenberg's discovery of matrix mechanics, it is good to look back at what he actually did to launch the era of the "new" quantum theory. Currently, most physicists have no clear idea how the original matrix mechanics works, its relationship to Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization, and why it had such an impact. In this talk, I will go through the history and the science of matrix mechanics using the harmonic oscillator as an example. I will show how the original logic changed into the standard approach that we teach to this day (whose origins lie with Born and Jordan, not Dirac). I will also highlight how this can be introduced into a quantum class to celebrate the centennial of the birth of quantum mechanics.
