Open course ware

One announcement, even though you will have no academic exercises Thursday and Friday, I know you would feel a sense of shock, disruption and dare I say dislocation in your life if I did not stick to schedule, so there will be a skill testing question on Tuesday based on Homework 12. And that will be the last one because the subsequent week is the last week of semester. And, since there is a final exam in this subject, there can be no tests during the last week of class, so we will not have any weekly test. Today I want to talk about biochemistry. We are going to spend the next three lectures on biochemistry. This is the chemistry of living organisms. And I want to make several points by way of introduction. The first one is that living organisms are chemical systems. And they are governed by the same laws that apply to inanimate matter. We don't have a special chemistry. And, in fact, I came across this comment that was made by the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman who ...

PROFESSOR: So so far even though these things look maybe interesting or a little familiar, we have not yet stated clearly how they apply to physics. We've been talking about vector spaces, V, for a particle. Then V tensor N. And we've looked at states there. We've looked at permutation operators there. Symmetric states there. Antisymmetric states there. What is missing is something that connects it to quantum mechanics. And that is given by the so-called symmetrization postulate. So it's a postulate. It's something that you technically can't derive. Therefore, you postulate. You can say it's an extra axiom even, quantum mechanics. You would say also that probably there's no other way to do things. So in some sense, it's forced. But I think it's more honest to admit it's an extra postulate. So here it goes. I'll read it first. Then I'll write it. So it says the following. If you have a system of N identical particles, arb...