What do you think?
Rate this book
Understanding Quantum Mechanics
Brand New
Paperback
First published May 1, 1903
2 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 12, 2009
if only all physics textbooks followed this scheme: about 40% history/ narrative/ philosophy/ background/ discussion/ motivation/ humor and about 60% hardcore equation-intensive derivation. rather like the feynman lectures.
a good portion of the math was beyond me, and he does a LOT of hand-waving in his proofs, but he basically says each time "look, if you want to see the nitty-gritty, all the detailed proofs are in my previous book, so i'll just outline the steps here." so next up is his first book, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
decoherence is shown to occur on a very short timescale, like 10^-29 s for macroscopic objects. thus the schrodinger's cat paradox is completely solved. by far the most exciting thing about decoherence is that wavefunction reduction is no longer necessary.
he does mention gravitation and general relativity a tiny bit this time round, but basically neglects any real discussion of time, which would be my only gripe. ultimately, i guess he feels the effects are negligible at this point in history, so there's no point worrying about them. if one day in the future physicists can do an experiment on quantum gravity scales, then perhaps all our current methods for QM will be shown to be an approximation to something wildly different. he has no problem with that possibility. but his goal is understanding QM as it stands now, since it works flawlessly for any experiment we can now do.
i'm glad i read the griffiths book Consistent Quantum Theory before this one, since that book explains the histories approach in great detail.
a good portion of the math was beyond me, and he does a LOT of hand-waving in his proofs, but he basically says each time "look, if you want to see the nitty-gritty, all the detailed proofs are in my previous book, so i'll just outline the steps here." so next up is his first book, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
decoherence is shown to occur on a very short timescale, like 10^-29 s for macroscopic objects. thus the schrodinger's cat paradox is completely solved. by far the most exciting thing about decoherence is that wavefunction reduction is no longer necessary.
he does mention gravitation and general relativity a tiny bit this time round, but basically neglects any real discussion of time, which would be my only gripe. ultimately, i guess he feels the effects are negligible at this point in history, so there's no point worrying about them. if one day in the future physicists can do an experiment on quantum gravity scales, then perhaps all our current methods for QM will be shown to be an approximation to something wildly different. he has no problem with that possibility. but his goal is understanding QM as it stands now, since it works flawlessly for any experiment we can now do.
i'm glad i read the griffiths book Consistent Quantum Theory before this one, since that book explains the histories approach in great detail.
Displaying 1 of 1 review