Today I have attended the first part of the lecture series I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Prof Roy covered lots of things in his very first lecture which might have made the junior undergraduate students feel slightly demotivated. This is obvious because the students who have not yet learned basic quantum mechanics properly, how will they appreciate the inadequacies as well as inconsistencies in quantum mechanics which have led to extension of quantum mechanics. At the end of the lecture the Head of the Physics department had to request Prof Roy to teach at slightly lower level from tomorrow looking at the fact that there are many junior students who are attending the lectures.
Anyway being a senior graduate student, I even could not follow the latter half of the lecture. He started with the theoretical inadequacies in quantum mechanics in spite of tremendous success experimentally and tried to motivate why we need a richer theory. He then mentioned Schrodinger's Cat experiment, Double Slit experiment, Wheeler's delayed choice double slit experiment, EPR Paradox, the concept of local reality and Bell's inequality. Then he showed how quantum mechanics does not obey this inequality. Although the qualitative part was very clear, the rigorous mathematical steps to derive the inequality was too much within an hour and in the very first lecture I believe. I hope he will repeat some of the things which he did today in tomorrow's lecture and will make the ideas, motivations very clear instead of spending much time on the mathematical derivations. Since most of the people are not familiar to this field at all, so they should get the motivations first to do it rather than start with the mathematics. Hope to see as many people as there were today. It could have been better to arrange some coffee and cookies to attract more people. Hope SAPD will do that in future lecture series....:)
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