Unofficial Course Title: Quantum
Spring Semester (Terms 4 & 5) 2026, Deep Springs College, Prof. Brian Hill
Directed Study Students: Lucinda Bean (DS 25) and Grisha London (DS 25)
Course meeting times: 6:30-7:55am, Mo/Th
The Quantum Mechanics DS Proposal will serve as our preliminary syllabus.
Detailed daily schedules will be kept retrospectively:
For the spring semester, we will study quantum mechanics, including solutions of Shrödinger’s equation, following Townsend. Normally one does not get to study quantum mechanics in depth until the junior year as a physics major. To get to quantum mechanics so quickly, we are short-circuiting past electromagnetism. The cost of this is that we have not encountered electromagnetic waves! So to understand quantum-mechanical waves we will first immerse ourselves in other, simple examples of waves. By the end of our quantum mechanics studies, you will be able to do probabilistic calculations using the strange mixture of deterministic time evolution punctuated by non-deterministic measurement events. You will understand how particles behave like waves, including doing all the unexpected things that waves do, such as taking many routes to a destination and exhibiting interference patterns. We will then study nuclear physics, and thanks to our study of quantum mechanics, heuristic rules for nuclear stability will be made qualitatively compelling using fermion gas and Coulomb repulsion arguments.
In sum, in this course you will encounter behaviors and theories so strange and wonderful that no human could have thought them up. Instead, nature rubbed the behaviors in our faces, and eventually, almost miraculously, in the early 20th century, physicists were able to understand and articulate what nature was showing them.