Weekend Editor on Nostr: What *really* struck me in grad school was how the shell model can work *at all* with ...

What *really* struck me in grad school was how the shell model can work *at all* with such strongly interacting particles. I mean... the shell model puts them in a 3-dimensional harmonic oscillator and calls it a day; you do perturbation theory on top of that (e.g., Hartree-Fock correction terms).

The key insight is that the strong force is so short-range. Replacing it by a global potential is not something I'd have thought about in a million yeaars.