The physical motivation for the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics is made clear and compelling by starting from an obvious fact — essentially, the stability of matter — and inquiring into its preconditions: what does it take to make this obvious fact possible?
Written in a lucid and engaging style, the author takes readers from an overview of classical mechanics and the historical development of quantum theory through to advanced topics. The mathematical aspects of quantum theory necessary for a firm grasp of the subject are developed in the early chapters, but an effort is made to motivate that formalism on physical grounds. Including animated figures and their respective Mathematica® codes, this book provides a complete and comprehensive text for students in physics, maths, chemistry and engineering needing an accessible introduction to quantum mechanics. Supplementary Mathematica codes available within Book Information
Written in a lucid and engaging style, the author takes readers from an overview of classical mechanics and the historical development of quantum theory through to advanced topics. The mathematical aspects of quantum theory necessary for a firm grasp of the subject are developed in the early chapters, but an effort is made to motivate that formalism on physical grounds. Including animated figures and their respective Mathematica® codes, this book provides a complete and comprehensive text for students in physics, maths, chemistry and engineering needing an accessible introduction to quantum mechanics. Supplementary Mathematica codes available within Book Information
It has been frequently said that "Quantum Mechanics is Magic".e real fact is just the opposite: quantum mechanics is not magic, it is rather one of the best scientific theories in terms of the amplitude and exactness of its predictions.Quantum Mechanics surprises us as it does not satisfy some a priori principles usually considered to be necessary preconditions to build up physics (as Einstein dixit).As these principles are also the basis of some important philosophical theories of science, these philosophical theories cannot be well founded.After criticizing them, we offer the preliminary lines of a methodology of physics adapted to the formalism of quantum mechanics.
The following notes introduce Quantum Mechanics at an advanced level addressing students of Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Electrical Engineering. The aim is to put mathematical concepts and techniques like the path integral, algebraic techniques, Lie algebras and representation theory at the readers disposal. For this purpose we attempt to motivate the various physical and mathematical concepts as well as provide detailed derivations and complete sample calculations. We have made every effort to include in the derivations all assumptions and all mathematical steps implied, avoiding omission of supposedly ‘trivial’ information. Much of the author’s writing effort went into a web of cross references accompanying the mathematical derivations such that the intelligent and diligent reader should be able to follow the text with relative ease, in particular, also when mathematically difficult material is presented. In fact, the author’s driving force has been his desire to pave the reader’s way into territories unchartered previously in most introductory textbooks, since few practitioners feel obliged to ease access to their field. Also the author embraced enthusiastically the potential of the TEX typesetting language to enhance the presentation of equations as to make the logical pattern behind the mathematics as transparent as possible. Any suggestion to improve the text in the respects mentioned are most welcome. It is obvious, that even though these notes attempt to serve the reader as much as was possible for the author, the main effort to follow the text and to master
For a century, quantum theorists have been reading the mathematical entrails of quantum mechanics (QM) to divine the nature of quantum reality. But to little avail. In this paper a different approach is taken, namely to identify and explain the basic intuitive ideas involved in QM. This does not tell one how those basic `gears' all mesh together in the beautiful mathematics of QM. But this does give one some intuitive (\textit{anschaulich})) ideas about the quantum reality described in the seemingly hard-to-interpret mathematical framework.