Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[polymath257]

Most physicists believed in the luminiferous aether, too. Have fun arguing from authority, if that makes you feel comfortable.

Yeah, pot meet kettle.

I admit that I might have been misquoting Griffiths earlier (it seemed to me that his proof was one of the integral of the Schrodinger equation being stationary with respect to time, which is what the Quantum Eternity Theorem seems to be saying).  While I have read Griffiths, I have not read Jackson at all (do not even own it), which is probably next on the list in trying to understand non-relativistic QM; from there, things get even worse as one ventures into the realm of QFT, with Peskin and Schroeder being the introductory text for 2nd or 3rd year PhD graduate students in physics.  In any case, Professor Griffiths did state, explicitly, in his book that to talk intelligently about QM, one must first understand the theory and mathematics behind QM.  I do not understand it; I admit that.  But, you're no physicist or cosmologist, either, and neither is WLC, and, neither am I.

You can believe, if you wish, that planets move around the Sun because there are invisible angelic beings who are pushing them along in their orbits.  Ditto for the Universe and its existence.  No physicist thiks that either of those hypotheses are necessary, though.  One thing is for sure -- neither of them are testable and neither of them are productive in terms of observing and/or explaining anything in or about our World.

Jackson is a classical E&M book, not a QM book. Peskin and Schroeder is a monster....It has the difficulty that physicists don't do math well (at least, according to mathematicians). Between Griffiths and P&S, I would suggest something like Bransden and Joachain.

I am a research mathematician and have done the PhD qualifying exams in physics but never did a dissertation.