{"id":217524,"date":"2025-07-10T01:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T06:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/calculating-the-electrons-magnetic-moment-state-dependent-values-emerge-from-dirac-equation"},"modified":"2025-07-10T01:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T06:25:09","slug":"calculating-the-electrons-magnetic-moment-state-dependent-values-emerge-from-dirac-equation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/calculating-the-electrons-magnetic-moment-state-dependent-values-emerge-from-dirac-equation","title":{"rendered":"Calculating the electron\u2019s magnetic moment: State-dependent values emerge from Dirac equation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/calculating-the-electrons-magnetic-moment-state-dependent-values-emerge-from-dirac-equation.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Quantum mechanics has a reputation that precedes it. Virtually everyone who has bumped up against the quantum realm, whether in a physics class, in the lab, or in popular science writing, is left thinking something like, \u201cNow, that is really weird.\u201d For some, this translates to weird and wonderful. For others it is more like weird and disturbing.<\/p>\n<p>Chip Sebens, a professor of philosophy at Caltech who asks foundational questions about physics, is firmly in the latter camp. \u201cPhilosophers of physics generally get really frustrated when people just say, \u2018OK, here\u2019s quantum mechanics. It\u2019s going to be weird. Don\u2019t worry. You can make the right predictions with it. You don\u2019t need to try to make too much sense out of it, just learn to use it.\u2019 That kind of thing drives me up the wall,\u201d Sebens says.<\/p>\n<p>One particularly weird and disturbing area of physics for people like Sebens is <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+field\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum field<\/a> theory. Quantum field theory goes beyond quantum mechanics, incorporating the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/special+theory+of+relativity\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">special theory of relativity<\/a> and allowing the number of particles to change over time (such as when an electron and positron annihilate each other and create two photons).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum mechanics has a reputation that precedes it. Virtually everyone who has bumped up against the quantum realm, whether in a physics class, in the lab, or in popular science writing, is left thinking something like, \u201cNow, that is really weird.\u201d For some, this translates to weird and wonderful. For others it is more like [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}