This is a rare gem: Four lectures on quantum mechanics by Paul Dirac… on YouTube! Here’s the first one.
Also, the Q+ online lecture series continues to go strong, bringing in a steady stream of high-quality speakers. This month constitutes the “Nobel lecture”, and will be given by Dietrich Leibfried of NIST Boulder, in lieu of Dave Wineland, on April 23rd at 5pm UK time. The title is “Towards scalable quantum information processing and quantum simulation with trapped ions”, and it’s sure to be a great talk. Though the number of live video streams will be limited, you can go to the Q+ website to reserve a spot, or wait until after the lecture and watch a recording.
Small correction about the Q+ talk. An arbitrarily large number of people can watch the talk live via the broadcast livestream (in principle the number is limited by the infrastructure, but I doubt we will have enough people to tax Google’s servers). It is only the seats in the hangout itself that are limited. A seat is needed if you want to be able to ask the speaker questions directly over the videoconference. However, people who watch the livestream can still ask questions by writing them in the comments feed under the video and either Daniel or I will bring them up in the hangout.
I envision a summer project for an enthusiastic student: provide scribe notes for these lectures.
These are terrific lectures by Dirac, and please let me say that I am immensely grateful to Quantum Pontiff for publicizing them (and to Richard Smythe for digitizing them and posting them to YouTube).
Dirac’s first lecture in particular is striking (to me) for showing how little the physicists of the 1920s understood even of classical mechanics. As Saunders Mac Lane wrote in his 1970 Chauvenet Symposium lecture Hamiltonian mechanics and geometry
and later on in his Mathematics: Form and Function (1986)
It is quite cheerful news for 21st century researchers (well, me anyway) that the 20th century of Paul Dirac and Saunders Mac Lane just barely began (we hope!) to “get to the bottom of it all” in regard to the immense mathematical riches that are associated to Hamiltonian dynamics on complex state-manifolds.These are terrific lectures, and please let me say that I am immensely grateful to Quantum Pontiff