(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best quantum theory books

I'd like to give you my two cents as well on how to proceed here. If nothing else, this will be a second opinion. If I could redo my physics education, this is how I'd want it done.

If you are truly wanting to learn these fields in depth I cannot stress how important it is to actually work problems out of these books, not just read them. There is a certain understanding that comes from struggling with problems that you just can't get by reading the material. On that note, I would recommend getting the Schaum's outline to whatever subject you are studying if you can find one. They are great books with hundreds of solved problems and sample problems for you to try with the answers in the back. When you get to the point you can't find Schaums anymore, I would recommend getting as many solutions manuals as possible. The problems will get very tough, and it's nice to verify that you did the problem correctly or are on the right track, or even just look over solutions to problems you decide not to try.

Basics

I second Stewart's Calculus cover to cover (except the final chapter on differential equations) and Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics. Not all sections from HRW are necessary, but be sure you have the fundamentals of mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, and thermal physics down at the level of HRW.

Once you're done with this move on to studying differential equations. Many physics theorems are stated in terms of differential equations so really getting the hang of these is key to moving on. Differential equations are often taught as two separate classes, one covering ordinary differential equations and one covering partial differential equations. In my opinion, a good introductory textbook to ODEs is one by Morris Tenenbaum and Harry Pollard. That said, there is another book by V. I. Arnold that I would recommend you get as well. The Arnold book may be a bit more mathematical than you are looking for, but it was written as an introductory text to ODEs and you will have a deeper understanding of ODEs after reading it than your typical introductory textbook. This deeper understanding will be useful if you delve into the nitty-gritty parts of classical mechanics. For partial differential equations I recommend the book by Haberman. It will give you a good understanding of different methods you can use to solve PDEs, and is very much geared towards problem-solving.

From there, I would get a decent book on Linear Algebra. I used the one by Leon. I can't guarantee that it's the best book out there, but I think it will get the job done.

This should cover most of the mathematical training you need to move onto the intermediate level physics textbooks. There will be some things that are missing, but those are usually covered explicitly in the intermediate texts that use them (i.e. the Delta function). Still, if you're looking for a good mathematical reference, my recommendation is Lua. It may be a good idea to go over some basic complex analysis from this book, though it is not necessary to move on.

Intermediate

At this stage you need to do intermediate level classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and thermal physics at the very least. For electromagnetism, Griffiths hands down. In my opinion, the best pedagogical book for intermediate classical mechanics is Fowles and Cassidy. Once you've read these two books you will have a much deeper understanding of the stuff you learned in HRW. When you're going through the mechanics book pay particular attention to generalized coordinates and Lagrangians. Those become pretty central later on. There is also a very old book by Robert Becker that I think is great. It's problems are tough, and it goes into concepts that aren't typically covered much in depth in other intermediate mechanics books such as statics. I don't think you'll find a torrent for this, but it is 5 bucks on Amazon. That said, I don't think Becker is necessary. For quantum, I cannot recommend Zettili highly enough. Get this book. Tons of worked out examples. In my opinion, Zettili is the best quantum book out there at this level. Finally for thermal physics I would use Mandl. This book is merely sufficient, but I don't know of a book that I liked better.

This is the bare minimum. However, if you find a particular subject interesting, delve into it at this point. If you want to learn Solid State physics there's Kittel. Want to do more Optics? How about Hecht. General relativity? Even that should be accessible with Schutz. Play around here before moving on. A lot of very fascinating things should be accessible to you, at least to a degree, at this point.

Advanced

Before moving on to physics, it is once again time to take up the mathematics. Pick up Arfken and Weber. It covers a great many topics. However, at times it is not the best pedagogical book so you may need some supplemental material on whatever it is you are studying. I would at least read the sections on coordinate transformations, vector analysis, tensors, complex analysis, Green's functions, and the various special functions. Some of this may be a bit of a review, but there are some things Arfken and Weber go into that I didn't see during my undergraduate education even with the topics that I was reviewing. Hell, it may be a good idea to go through the differential equations material in there as well. Again, you may need some supplemental material while doing this. For special functions, a great little book to go along with this is Lebedev.

Beyond this, I think every physicist at the bare minimum needs to take graduate level quantum mechanics, classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. For quantum, I recommend Cohen-Tannoudji. This is a great book. It's easy to understand, has many supplemental sections to help further your understanding, is pretty comprehensive, and has more worked examples than a vast majority of graduate text-books. That said, the problems in this book are LONG. Not horrendously hard, mind you, but they do take a long time.

Unfortunately, Cohen-Tannoudji is the only great graduate-level text I can think of. The textbooks in other subjects just don't measure up in my opinion. When you take Classical mechanics I would get Goldstein as a reference but a better book in my opinion is Jose/Saletan as it takes a geometrical approach to the subject from the very beginning. At some point I also think it's worth going through Arnold's treatise on Classical. It's very mathematical and very difficult, but I think once you make it through you will have as deep an understanding as you could hope for in the subject.

I've bought a fair amount of ebooks on Amazon recently and I think most of them are books that a lot of people here would enjoy (heck I heard about most of them through here!).

The Preorders:

Underlord - The sixth book in the Cradle series which is described as a Western Xianxia series. A lot of people here don't really like the Xianxia genre and I agree with their criticisms of how many main characters are very villainous, under-developed enemies and female characters, the economies of cultivation aren't logical, poor scaling in conflict as you go from one city to interstellar in scope, and awkward prose. But I bring up all of these flaws to say that the Cradle series completely avoids all of the typical flaws in Xianxia and has a very smart character who sets out to cultivate smartly instead of bullheadedly.

And the sixth book is coming out in March! (Get the box set. It has the first three books and is cheaper!)

Exhalation - Who here hasn't heard of Ted Chiang, the master of short stories that perfectly appeal to the r/rational crowd? The same guy that we literally use as an introduction to rational fiction. Well, if you enjoyed his first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, you'll love hearing that the second collection is coming out in....May! (Ugh....really May? I don't think I can wait that long!)

The books you can read right now!:

The Beginner's Guide to Magical Licensing - Has a similar start to Unsong where a magical college-graduate, minimum-wage, sweat-shop worker stumbles on a powerful spell and sets out to start his own business competing with the powerful. The parts of the story that follows afterward makes a whole lot more logical sense than Unsong however. (Used to be online for free, but now you'll have to pay the price for your ignorance if you want to read it! (Nah, I lied.))

Six Sacred Swords - If you liked the Arcane Ascension series, but wished there was more dungeonnering and less of school shenanigans, then look no further! In some ways it's a lot like reading a very good DnD session played by really savvy players who never follow the 'standard' way to solve problems.

The author of Six Sacred Swords made a recommendation for The Ruin of Kings. He said that it reads like a Locke Lamora-esque rogue protagonist, telling the story in a style similar to Kvothe, in a setting similar to Game of Thrones. I haven't bought the book yet, but the review was interesting enough that I wanted to include it in my list of recommendations.

Senlin Ascends - I haven't read this yet either, but skimming through it, I see some fair bit of social manipulation/combat that I think people here would like. Plus the Tower of Babel setting is something that appeals very strongly to me.

Polyglot: NPC REVOLUTION - A lot of people here seem to really like LitRPG and Artificial Intelligence, but almost no one seem to ever question the implications of the NPCs in LitRPG stories having human-level intelligence.

Small Medium: Big Trouble - It's by the same author who wrote Threadbare that people here really liked. Similar to Polygot where the NPC is the main character who needs to deal with players, but smaller scale in scope. There's a lot of fast-talking to convince selfish sociopaths to do what you say.

Q is for Quantum - I was going through my older ebook orders when I found this one. It's the single best introduction for quantum mechanics that I have ever read (not that I've read too many of those). It focuses on building an intuition for the subject and once you've read through the book, you will understand on a gut level what superposition means. Note that it's meant as an introduction for the subject, so don't expect it to cover everything, just what's need to get started learning about quantum mechanics. But I'd still recommend it to experts if only for a better way to explain their subject to their peers and laypeople.

That's perfect then, don't let me stop you :). When you're ready for the real stuff, the standard books on quantum mechanics are (in roughly increasing order of sophistication)

• Griffiths (the standard first course, and maybe the best one)
  
• Cohen-Tannoudji (another good one, similar to Griffiths and a bit more thorough)
  
• Shankar (sometimes used as a first course, sometimes used as graduate text; unless you are really good at linear algebra, you'd get more out of starting with the first two books instead of Shankar)
  
  By the time you get to Shankar, you'll also need some classical mechanics. The best text, especially for self-learning, is [Taylor's Classical Mechanics.] (http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Mechanics-John-R-Taylor/dp/189138922X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372650839&sr=1-1&keywords=classical+mechanics)
  
  
  Those books will technically have all the math you need to solve the end-of-chapter problems, but a proper source will make your life easier and your understanding better. It's enough to use any one of
  
  
• Paul's Free Online Notes (the stuff after calculus, but without some of the specialized ways physicists use the material)
  
• Boas (the standard, focuses on problem-solving recipes)
  
• Nearing (very similar to Boas, but free and online!)
  
• Little Hassani (Boas done right, with all the recipes plus real explanations of the math behind them; after my math methods class taught from Boas, I immediately sold Boas and bought this with no regrets)
  
  When you have a good handle on that, and you really want to learn the language used by researchers like Dr. Greene, check out
  
  
• Sakurai (the standard graduate QM book; any of the other three QM texts will prepare you for this one, and this one will prepare you for your PhD qualifying exams)
  
• Big Hassani(this isn't just the tools used in theoretical physics, it's the content of mathematical physics. This is one of two math-for-physics books that I keep at my desk when I do my research, and the other is Little Hassani)
  
• Peskin and Schroeder (the standard book on quantum field theory, the relativistic quantum theory of particles and fields; either Sakurai or Shankar will prepare you for this)
  
  Aside from the above, the most relevant free online sources at this level are
  
  
• Khan Academy
  
• Leonard Susskind's Modern Physics lectures
  
• MIT's Open CourseWare

I think this is a fine place for the post, but you might also try /r/AskPhysics.

A good question is, how much time do you want to spend doing this? While anybody can learn math/physics deeply, it does take time. If you see this as being a Sunday hobby, you may want to stick with books that are aimed at a popular audience. Examples:

• A Brief History of Time by Hawking
  
• The First Three Minutes by Weinberg
  
• In Search of Schrödinger's Cat by Gribbin
  
  Books by Michiu Kaku and Brian Greene purportedly explain a lot of current bleeding-edge theory in simple terms. Popular interpretations of abstract mathematics are a little harder to come by. If you're interested in mathematics as a subject all to itself, you might start with Gowers' book Mathematics: a Very Short Introduction.
  
  If you want to invest somewhat more time, I recommend you check out Lenny Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum" lecture series here. He's written an associated book on classical mechanics, and another on quantum mechanics. These lectures and books are directed towards self-leaners who have a mildly quantitative background, but have never studied physics deeply. However, I strongly recommend you familiarize yourself with calculus first.
  
  The stuff in the "Theoretical Minimum" series might seem boring compared with the material aimed at popular audiences, but it's necessary background if you want to dig into those topics at a higher level. If you learn it, you'll be able to understand a much wider selection of sources on other fields of physics.
  
  Best of luck finding something you like! You can always post back here if you're having trouble.

Do you know which fields of physics are you interested in?

If Quantum Information/Quantum Computation sounds interesting, I would look at this book. I used it when I first learned about the topic. It doesn't assume much advanced math, just basic matrix/vector multiplications will suffice.
There's a reason the book doesn't assume much prior knowledge. It has two parts, Quantum Information and Quantum Computation. Roughly speaking the former is physics and the latter is computer science. And usually physicists don't know much about computer science and computer scientists don't know much about physics.


There's also another book, "Q for Quantum", published very recently by Terry Rudolph. I haven't read the book myself (I plan to), but from what he described in an email it might be something you're looking for:


> I have finally finished a book, "Q is for Quantum", that teaches the fundamentals of quantum theory to people who start off knowing only basic arithmetic.

> I have successfully used this method in outreach with students as young as 12, but of course it is much easier when you can have a proper back-and-forth dialogue. In practice it is late-stage high school students I am most passionate about reaching with this book - I believe quantum theory can (and should) be taught quantitatively in high school, not 2 years into an undergraduate physics degree! In fact I would be delighted if the 3rd and 4th year students entering my undergraduate lecture courses already understood as much quantum theory as covered in the book.


Have fun!

> Cultural beliefs do actually influence ways of thought, scientific method included

The scientific method is not a "way of thought". It's a method. You're not providing any evidence to support that claim. The fact that different cultures have different patterns of thought is well-established, the idea that this makes science culturally relative is not. Are you saying logic is culturally dependent as well?

> Westerners tend to rely more on formal logic and insist on correctness of one belief over another when investigating conflicting opinions or theories, while easterners consider all the interacting environmental relationships,

A vague and unsubstantiated orientalist over-generalization if I ever heard one.

> One can even argue the Scientific Method is actually an invention of the western tradition

The automobile is a western invention too, and yet the Japanese understand them just the same way as we do.

>TL;DR: read something like The Geography of Thought for intriguing trends in how your Asian lab partner interprets data differently from you.

I've never run across a case where he did. Read a good book on philosophy of science to understand why natural science strives to eliminate bias, including cultural bias. It's not contingent on it but the exact opposite.

>Difference being Goswami was a quantum physics professor

There's no such thing as a 'quantum physics professor' or really a 'quantum physicist'. All physicists study quantum mechanics and nearly all use it, to different extents. Goswami's actual expertise is apparently nuclear physics, which does not imply any greater understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics than that of most physicists.

> who wrote respected college textbooks

As far as I can tell, he's written one textbook on introductory quantum mechanics. I've never heard of him or his textbook before, and I see little reason to believe it's 'well-respected' or popular, as it only has 5 amazon reviews, as compared to 70 for Griffiths, an actual well-regarded textbook. Sakurai's "Modern QM" and Shankar's "Principles of QM" are popular and well-respected as well. Griffith's is also known for the consistent-histories interpretation of quantum mechanics, while the latter two are 'Easterners', yet don't subscribe to any of this kind of nonsense.

> My background is not in quantum physics, but sooner or later you guys will have to (you should?) reconcile your understanding of reality with how different cultural traditions interpret reality.

You haven't shown any depth of knowledge about 'cultural traditions'. You've made gross generalizations and outright false statements about these things. Calling Western philosophy 'materialist' while 'eastern' is supposedly uniformly 'idealist' (both terms are from Western philosophy) is flat-out wrong.

> Furthermore, the jump is discontinuous in that the electron is never in any orbit not defined by one of the probability clouds.

That's saying that mixed states and quantum superpositions do not exist. It's wrong, and introductory level understanding of formal quantum mechanics is enough to know it.

>Can you please point me to a more accurate description?

Show that the eigenfunctions of the electronic Hamiltonian are no longer eigenfunctions under the action of a perturbing external electromagnetic field.

> What is the interesting part of the delayed-choice experiment then if it's not that what we observe depends on how we measure it?

Did you make any effort at all to find out on your own, such as reading the wikipedia article? I don't see why I should spend time explaining it otherwise. The fact that "what we observe depends on how we measure it" is already evident in the double-slit experiment.

> the most interesting scientific discoveries come when interpretations of science and philosophy butt up against each other.

No, they don't. The most interesting scientific discoveries come when a well-established theory is proven wrong. Metaphysics has nothing to do with science. The Bell test is not philosophy, it's science. It's an empirical test of an empirically-testable thing.

> it appears that a non-local signal (that is, a deliberate faster-than-light transmission) is impossible

It's not the Bell test that says that, it's special relativity.

> Help me understand reality as you interpret it.

Now why the heck would I spend any time on doing that? There's a huge number of good, factual popular-scientific books on quantum mechanics and modern physics. There are plenty of good textbooks. There are good books on science and philosophy of science as well. But instead you waste your time on reading Goswami's nonsense, which would clearly be out of the mainstream to anyone who'd bothered to do a modicum of web searching beforehand. Then you defend it all, basically by stating that you know better than an actual scientist how science works.

You haven't shown that you've made even the slightest bit of a good-faith effort to understand either science, the scientific method and mindset, or established quantum physics. To me it appears that you came here seeking confirmation of what you'd already decided you wanted to believe.

Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil Tyson, Stephen Weinberg and Murray Gell-Mann, among others, have all written good popular-scientific books on modern physics. Just about all of them say something about quantum mechanics and the more popular interpretations of it. And for a more in-depth study of the philosophy of science surrounding quantum mechanics, read e.g. Omnes' "Quantum philosophy".

In Search Of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin is a very readable physics and quantum physics history sketch. Might be slightly dated now, although I can't think of anything directly contradicted by recent work. Then again, I'm not actually a physicist :)

The Quark and the Jaguar is quite a bit more complicated, but still quite accessible to the layperson and has a lot of interesting stuff.

Slightly less sciency, more maths/logic/computation is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology is pretty much what the title says, although there's an awful lot about fruit-flies too. Quite a good review of the history of biological experimentation, especially genetics.

H2O: A Biography of Water from a previous editor of Nature, covers water across a variety of fields. The second half of the book is mostly a rant about cold fusion and homoeopathy though, from what I recall, but the first half makes up for it.

Most general-audience things by Richard Feynman are well worth the read. He's got some great physics lectures, and his autobiography (Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?) is fun, but more for the anecdotes than the science.

Those are off the top of my head. If its something in a particular field, I might have some other ideas I'm currently forgetting.

Sorry, re-reading that, I sound like an asshole. One thing to remember is this isn't basic physics. The lecture is good in that it covers the basics, but the basics of relativity aren't so basic. I have two texts that cover this, the more basic of which covers the material in this lecture, and that one's called Modern Physics. It's a pretty basic book, covers derivations pretty well, if you're interested.

Technogeeky's response is good. I think it's important to remember that the pop-culture understanding of black holes just isn't right.

Anything by Feynmann are great reads. For upper division instrumental analysis, spectroscopy, and quantum I wholly recommend QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman et al. It describes all the concepts in the book in layman's terms in a brilliant narrative of chemistry. I recommend it to anyone that wants to learn about the strangeness of physics and chemistry. It is easy to digest.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, although pricey helped me survive physics (I have the paperbacks). It seems you can read the entirety online at that site.

If you choose to do a lot of organic chemistry laboratory work then Advanced Practical Organic Chemistry is a really great resource. It covers just about everything you need to know to be very competent and safe in the lab. I found a used copy of the second edition that has served me well. I don't know what has been updated in the third edition.

I agree with /u/lmo2th Pauling has written albeit old but definitive books on chemistry. Although it can be very difficult to read and knowledge of differential equations is required, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry by Linus Pauling et al. was the most succinct book on the nitty gritty math of QM I found.

I recently graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry, it was difficult, but I loved every minute I spent in the lab doing research and can't imagine doing anything else. Edit: QED and Feynmann Lectures are great reads for lower division classes. Save the second two for if you decide on chemistry.

>Time surely existed before the big bang

Though I tend to agree that time did not 'begin' with the big bang, we definitely cannot say that it surely existed before the big bang. We cannot even say with certainty that time surely exists at all. It is feasible that the so-called dimension of time is nothing more than a byproduct of our perception of motion, and some physicists (Julian Barbour comes to mind most readily) have proposed models in favor of this view.

As for what came before the big bang, the only legitimate scientific theory to turn to would be the inflationary model. It says that our universe decayed from a false vacuum state that expands at an exponential rate. The false vacuum is unstable and decays at an exponential rate as well, but in most formulations of the theory its rate of expansion is greater than its rate of decay. This implies that the false vacuum state will never decay entirely.

Our universe, in the modern inflationary theory, is a single expanding bubble of true vacuum within a much larger false vacuum state. The transition from a false vacuum to a true vacuum state is the event we term the 'big bang.' Pockets of true vacuum such as our universe are continually forming within it, sometimes collapsing again and sometimes expanding eternally at the own much more mundane rates, but overall the expanding false vacuum should approach a steady-state condition in a manner similar to the steady-state model of our own expanding universe that Fred Hoyle favored over the big bang hypothesis.

(This is paraphrased from a passage in Alan Guth's book on the subject that really stuck with me. I hope I did it justice.)

EDIT: Though that inflationary model opens the door for what Guth called an "eternally inflating" false vacuum with neither beginning nor end, and definitely implies that the false vacuum should continue to expand infinitely, there are still mathematical arguments that have been made suggesting it still must have had a definite 'beginning' at some point.

Yeah, this seems right to me. The initial presentation of many scientific ideas is often flawed in important but subtle ways, and sometimes uses notation that's really cumbersome compared to contemporary presentations. Newton's Principia is brilliant, but it's very hard to follow because of his idiosyncratic calculus notation and the names he chose for various concepts that never caught on.

In science (especially highly mathematical sciences), teaching beginners the standard notation and the commonly accepted techniques for solving various classes of problems is just as important as teaching them the concepts themselves. Filtering classical mechanics through a few centuries of revision and refinement yields a much more pedagogically useful presentation than Newton's. It also allows you to structure things in such a way that prior work leads naturally into subsequent developments.

In climate science, a lot of the meaningful work that's been done since the early days has consisted in developing and refining better models that include more processes and/or improve the structures that link the various subsystems of the model together. Many of the forcings that we now recognize play a really essential role in driving the climate system were either totally unknown or else very poorly understood at the dawn of the field, so the earliest texts are extremely misleading, and might actually give students a bad understanding of how the climate system works. Relatedly, the computation-heavy nature of the field means that things which were totally impossible to do in (say) 1950 are completely trivial now, since computing power has increased so much since the early days. Early modelers tied themselves up in knots to work around the technological limitations of the day, yielding models that were strikingly clever, but unnecessarily confusing by today's standards.

>All that said, I have found that in particular when talking about foundations of quantum mechanics and foundations of statistical mechanics, the lack of historical knowledge is detrimental. People will try and talk about Bell and EPR without having read any of the papers, and it leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Absolutely. Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics in particular is excellent, and includes a better foundational presentation than most contemporary stuff.

Ok, looked at this thing (PDF warning) and it looks like a modern physics course + intro mechanics.

If you're interested in more pop-sci stuff I would look into Dance Of The Photons by Zeilinger. It covers some more popular elements of quantum in a very accessible but not crank-y way. Zeilinger is a legit dude. Unfortunately I don't know much about pop-sci physics books because I tend to avoid them.

If you're more interested in textbook stuff, I would look into some of the classic undergraduate books depending on what you're interested in. So stuff like Taylor for mechanics, Griffiths for E&M, and so on.

Of course there's always the Feynman lectures as well which are online. I think all of these should be approachable to you. I'm not sure what your math background is, assuming you're comfortable with calculus and some differential equations. Probably linear algebra as well. If not, I would look into these as well, unfortunately I don't have any book recommendations for these subjects though.

Also did some googling and I found this list which might be handy to look at.

Can I suggest this book? Honestly, I'm not sure what's an appropriate level for a nine year old but it's a bit much I'm sure you can help her out. The book is targeted at the general public and does quite a nice job explaining some of the "sexier" bits of quantum mechanics like entanglement. The author is a very serious and active researcher in the field so you're not getting some half-baked attempt by a non-scientist either.

I don't know of any decent online particle physics resources. But there are two good books at the undergraduate level I can think of Griffiths and Halzen and Martin

For superconductivity you want to learn many body quantum mechanics, ie non-relativistic quantum field theory. The most common recommendation is Fetter and Walecka, but I might consider Thouless to be superior on account of it being 1/3rd the length and probably only covers core topics. If you feel like dropping a lot of money, Mahan is very good, but also somewhat exhaustive. Might be worth having as a reference depending on how serious you get. I would get F&W and Thouless simply on account of how cheap they are.

Yeah, honestly, Lagrangians are my favorite mathematical topics in Physics, they are super cool. There are many ways to evaluate path integrals, but the method I leaned involved lagrangians. Here is the book I used for my research. It is really cheap and is written by one of the smartest men of our century. I would highly recommend purchasing this book.

Entanglement entropy in spin liquids is a kinda narrow and recent niche, so I'm not sure if you'll find much outside of research papers. For condensed matter in general, the canonical recommendation is Fetter and Walecka - it's a bit old, but it would be a good book to bridge the gap from HEP to condensed matter.

Edit: Another good book in the spirit of F&W is the one by Negele. It might be a better fit if you feel that the first one is too basic or shallow.

I think you can explain even a very complex subject like quantum physics if you really understand the material. Here is one amazing book that explains quantum physics in a easy to grasp way. It actually uses cartoons and illustrations almost exclusively. This book has won large number of awards. http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Quantum-Theory-Sciences-Discovery/dp/1840468505/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266133288&sr=1-1#reader_1840468505

As for modern physics texts any of these should be fine but I have only glanced at them: Thornton and Rex, Krane, Bernstein, Fishbane, and Gasiorowicz

I read through Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics and it is really good if you want a lot of conceptual discussion of special relativity, not as much mathematics involved but honestly the math doesn't get too gnarly in SR anyways so conceptual might be the better approach to the topic. Unfortunately it only goes over SR, and not any of the other modern topics.

I am using Conquering the Physics GRE as an overview, but I really enjoy anything from David Morin and David J. Griffiths for the level of questions and explanations (and in-book/online solutions manuals that go a long way towards showing you how to think like a physicist). But my "library" for preparing for the physics GRE is:

CM: Morin, Problems and Solutions in Introductory Mechanics and Introduction to Classical Mechanics

Gregory, Classical Mechanics for extra explanations and problems

EM: Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics 3e

QM: Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics 3e

Thermo/Stat.Mech: Schroeder, An Introduction to Thermal Physics

Kittel and Kroemer, Thermal Physics

Waves: Morin, on his website are ten chapters to what appears to be a Waves book in the making

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/waves/

Atomic, Lab Methods: Conquering the Physics GRE and any online resources I can find.

​

If you email Case Western, they send a link to some amazing flash cards!

>How do you excite the electron field?

You dump energy into it. When you excite the electron field, you're creating an electron, any process that creates an electron is exciting the electron field.

>"when you excite it you get an electron": you mean that you "take an electron out" the electron field?

Electrons are excitations of the electron field, you aren't taking them out of anywhere. When you throw a rock in a lake and get waves, are you taking waves out of the lake?

>Is quantum field theory the branch of physics that explains this stuff?

Yes

>Any article or text or book where I can read about it at a beginner level (but including the maths if possible)?

The math behind QFT is fairly complex, most texts don't show the actual math, unless it's an actual qft textbook. If that doesn't deter you, Student friendly quantum field theory is a great book, but unless you have a high level of mathematical/physics knowledge, it'll be difficult. At a minimum, you need calculus, differential equations, special relativity and understanding of the Schrödinger equation to make it through the first few chapters.

+1 for Taylor. I haaaaated the Thornton and Marion text. Taylor's book really helped me connect all the concepts that were floating untethered in my brain.

When you get to quantum, get this text as a supplement if it's not what your professor uses. It's so well and humorously written, that I read the unassigned chapters for fun.

YouTube was another valuable resource for me. If I still didn't understand something after finishing a problem with my professor, I would find a similar problem worked out on YouTube. More often than not, it really helped everything sink in more clearly.

Most of my upper level professors made us write solutions in complete sentences with every step explained. I highly recommend this if it's not already required of you. It improved my ability to recall information later and my understanding of the problems. One professor always complained how students would come back to him with their graded assignment and say "Well, you know what I meant." His response was, "No, actually. I don't know what you mean. The burden of expressing what you mean lies with you, the author of the assignment, not me." That really stuck with me and made me a much better student/scientist in several ways.

Good luck!

Edit: forgot to add that I found a pdf of Taylor's text online for free. If you have trouble finding it, let me know. I'll see if I can find the link.

Full disclosure: I'm a software engineer at Microsoft

Here's a few resources I found useful. I just started learning quantum computing recently too:

• Book: Q is for Quantum by Terry Rudolph. A great introduction for those without a maths background.
  
  
• Textbook: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. It’s already been suggested for good reason, and +1 for the comment to ask if you get stuck with anything.
  
  
• Youtube: Professor Vazirani’s online lecture videos. I think he’s great.
  
  
• Online course: MIT Quantum Information course taught by Shor and Chuang
  
  
• Meetups: Find a meetup in your area if you can, I've been going to the London Quantum Computing meetup for any Londoners reading this
  
  
  Shameless plug time (sorry), I’ve written a blog that aims to explain the background material for a quantum “hello world” and show you how to write that in Q#. I'm learning too so would love your thoughts/feedback/hate mail if you do give it a read.
  

I also recommend reading Euclid, Ptolemy, Tusi, Copernicus and Kepler if you want to see how a sincere attempt at modeling natural phenomena looked before physics per se. They're pretty accessible if you read them in that order (e.g. Ptolemy directly references Euclid's theorems and Kepler attempts a lot of comparisons of the pre-existing theories). Also, if not for them, there would be no Newton, Lagrange, Laplace et al (which are also worth reading, of course).

Also, this book is surprisingly deep in the sense of what you said i.e. "the path that physicists followed in order to get to the big ideas". I got a lot out of it (namely about the old quantum theory).

I agree. He's more of a philosopher than a scientist, at least when it comes to his positions on science and God (he's written a textbook on quantum mechanics that is claimed to be sound, probably because it lacks his philosophical stuff).

I'm basing my views on the "documentary" (more like a hagiography) of Goswami streaming on Netflix. In the entire program, he only makes reference to one experiment where two people in separate rooms start mirroring each other's brain activity when they meditate (if I remember it right). The paucity of evidence for his arguments aside, even this one experiment seemed anything but conclusive.

Perhaps instead of rebuttals, you can try to shift your friends focus for looking for Goswami's evidence? Maybe make your friend see that we need to see experiments and data confirming his theories, rather than his philosophical arguments?

Edit: clarity

Nobel laureate in one field?? Did you miss the bit about the other Nobel prize?

Francis Crick called him the father of molecular biology: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-03-01/local/me-13101_1_crick

.

Textbooks written:

General Chemistry

The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals: An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry

.

Vitamin C vindication:

The trouble with most vitamin C studies is usually too small a dose. Also the oral vs intravenous thing. You know animals produce grams and grams per day, humans have a genetic deficit. This is my favourite article to explain: http://www.hearttechnology.com/1992-v07n01-p005.pdf

http://scienceblogs.com/gofindyourowndamnlinks/2009/02/18/vitamin-c-and-cancer-has-linus-pauling-b/

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/linus-pauling-vindicated-researchers-claim-rda-for-vitamin-c-is-flawed-71172707.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/aug/05/cancer.medicalresearch

http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2008/4/newly-discovered-benefits-of-vitamin-c/Page-01

.

Heart disease is scurvy:

http://nutritionreview.org/2013/04/collagen-connection/

http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/pdf-files/heart_book.pdf

.

Also, here's an interesting read on nukes (remember that peace prize?) and free radicals (that other one was in chemistry): http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2011/6/optimize-your-internal-defenses-against-radiation-exposure/Page-02

.

I hope this helps! My personal random-guy-on-the-internet recommendation is several hundred milligrams a few times a day, preferably away from food, increasing dosage during illness.

>QM

Definitely pick up Feynman's QM and Path Integrals, a step towards particle physics after Griffith's.

>QED (nontechnical)

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter By Mr. Feynman. Written for the layperson, so if your just starting out it would be VERY advanced yet VERY easy to understand and really gives you a feel of modern physics to entice you in the classical studies.

>GR

I picked up Dirac's book last week and I have to say it is most succinct. I've tried one other GR book and various online sources and they all were terrible and I made zero progress. Dirac is crazy good.

And also: THE LAGRANGIAN IS IMPORTANT! That is all.

For anything with statistical mechanics i whole heartedly recommend Mandl. Doesn't have much (I believe in fact nothing) on QFT's but it is certainly the best book I know for stats

Amazon Link

>spin is just some fundamental quality that's tacked onto particles

You make it sound like spin was just invented willy nilly. For the sake of explanation, spin is an experimentally motivated quantity. See the Stern–Gerlach_experiment. For those interested, a very good pedagogical survey of the subject is given in the first chapter of Sakurai's book.

Momentum is the value that the momentum operator gives you. It will be related to the time evolution of the field, as you would expect for a quantity classically related to velocity. In coherent states, which are mixtures of states in any bases that are sufficiently localized in space, the classical limit is recovered.


Spin is the result of another operator, but what it gives you is the angular momentum of an electron. Everybody agrees on this. No physicist thinks it's actually spinning because they're not dense and have enough imagination to know a vector quantity can exist all on its own. Here are two experts that agree on this definition - I know this because all the experts agree on the definition, because they're all working with the exact same mathematical model.

This is literally first year stuff, as in actual first years taking physics classes in college will learn it. Occasionally, they will delay it to their second year - I suppose that was my ego at play.

This is the standard text for many quantum information and foundation courses. It introduces most of the mathematical requirements but it's very useful to have a handle on linear algebra.

For more foundational issues, this is a good start, although a little too outdated to cover the stuff talked about here.

"Quantum field theory arose out of our need to describe the ephemeral nature of life."

So quoth the great Anthony Zee in his monumental tome on QFT.

Resorting to fields is an elegant way (that works) of explaining creation and destruction of particles.

Also dug this up. (holy shit I was much more articulate back then)

Quantized fields are very different from usual wave picture of fields as well as the particle picture, because what is being quantized is not the field itself, but its fourier modes. Before QFT, you had things like dual nature and what not where light was both a wave and a particle depending on what sort of calculation you were attempting.

QFT also goes several leaps further, because fields are the most basic objects there. Electrons are fourier mode quanta of an 'electronic field' in the same wat that photons are of the electromagnetic field. Every particle is a quanta of the fourier mode of a field.

(Bonus : In Aether theory such particle evaporates/dissolves in vacuum like watter droplet in its vapor. It can reapear/condense somewhere else. This subreddit needs Zephir_BBQ !)

Get this book.

Also, this book seems good. Granted I knew QFT by the time I started reading that book.

QFT is hard. Obtaining an thorough understanding it is probably the hardest thing I've ever accomplished in my life. To be honest, nothing that can be understood via words or verbal explanations will lead you to understanding QFT. You HAVE to work through the math. The words which we use to describe "virtual particle" fail the concept so miserably that we might as well not try (in my opinion).

If Griffith's is the furthest you'll go in QM and an UG book is the furthest you'll go in CM, you'll have a rough task ahead of you. Luckily, Klauber is EXTREMELY thorough and walks you through everything.

The OP had a question about Julian Barbour's "End of Time". Barbour is a physicist with an iconclastic view of the nature of spacetime. He views the perception of reality as a string of jumps from one frozen configuration of energy in spacetime to another. Each of these "time capsules" contains a complete history of its past.

However, the reply by Tom (who hasn't read the book) didn't really respond to the question. As you say, it's mostly pontificating. However, the quotes from the Buddhist sources are quite interesting, and many of them are entirely consistent with Barbour's thesis. Tom does present what amounts to a dual of Barbour's thesis: "...the way that's experienced is that you feel that you (Buddha Mind) are absolutely still in the midst of a world of absolute motion..."

In Barbour's view, you are jumping through independent worlds of absolute stillness.

All worlds energetically allowable exist. Transitions between them are those with the highest probability, and the transitions may not be unique.

I recommend Barbour's book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195145925/qid=1140375254/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9273098-8804053?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

This was the book I used for my two semesters of quantum. Its really well written and has good problems at the end of chapter, I can pm you the solutions if you want. I guess this book is special since it starts with the spin approach instead of the more conventional wave approach at first.

PHYSICS!

I kid, I kid
Feynman is one of a kind really, i have never really found someone who is like him murry
Murry Gell-Mann is good though

A relatively new book (McIntyre, 2012) that my university used to teach upper-division quantum mechanics this year actually starts with the Stern-Gerlach.

It was actually really well-received, and I liked it a lot. It introduces Stern-Gerlach and Dirac notation immediately (four pages in and you're already using bra-ket notation to talk about Stern-Gerlach).

I recommend it highly.

You might want to consider Q is for Quantum which explains quamtum physics in a new way that only requires high school level mathematics.

It's just a suggestion. As long as you're having fun with what you're doing, keep going!!!

Schaum's Outline Series? There's a quantum physics I believe. I have some of the old math ones--they're awesome.

edit: here's a quantum mechanics one: http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Quantum-Mechanics-Second/dp/0071623582/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259858848&sr=8-3

For a concise introduction to the concepts without all the jargon I’d recommend “Q is for Quantum” by Terry Rudolph. It doesn’t assume university-level maths like most of others, and yet it gets to explain most of the fundamental aspects without getting tangled in technicalities. For a tester of his style you can check his inaugural lecture on YouTube!

https://www.amazon.com/Q-Quantum-Terry-Rudolph/dp/0999063502

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JKGZDhQoR9E

that's what happened to me in the april exam. i drastically improved my score by completing multiple chapters out of schaum's 3000 physics problems and completely forgoing practicing with the previous exams. if you plan on taking the exam again, consider that strategy (note there is also a schaum's guide to quantum mechanics)

Unless you want to learn isolated bits and pieces, I'd recommend reading a book or watching a course.

I've been reading Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum. There's also online lectures that go with it. So far it's been useful; filling knowledge holes and whatnot.

Fun book about this here

You might want to have a minimal background in quantum field theory.(Check out Tony Zee's book http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Field-Theory-Nutshell-Zee/dp/0691010196 sorry, linking isn't working for me)

However, there have been some very good introductions to the gauge-gravity duality that try to get the reader up to speed with as little background as possible. (I say try because this is a very daunting task)

Check out:

• John McGreevy's MIT OCW course http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-821-string-theory-fall-2008/
  
• Pedro Vieira's Strings video course at Perimeter http://pirsa.org/12030042/

Susskind's Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum is a good, informal place to start. I'd read it before tackling Griffiths or Sakurai. For a quick brush-up on the math, you could try Shankar's Basic Training in Mathematics: A Fitness Program for Science Students, but the basics of calculus, diff eq, abstract & linear algebra will get you started.

The Hartree-Fock method builds molecular orbitals for a given molecule out of atomic orbitals of a given basis set. Depending on how much calculus you know, this project may be difficult, as it is more appropriate for a 3rd year university student. If you're still interested though, these two books and ppt should help:
linus pauling
Attila Szabo
An Introduction to Quantum Chemistry

Another idea you guys could look into is researching the chemistry of semiconductors in computer chips, how semiconductors work, and possibly look into the future of quantum computing (if there is one).

Sorry to take so long to get back to you.

Barbour talked about 'memory' as that which creates a perception of time ...

https://www.amazon.com/End-Time-Next-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925

"Introducing Quantum Theory" by McEvoy and Zarate is a decent overview of quantum, with lots of graphics.

Stay away from Michio Kaku. He's a hack.

Specifically written for high schoolers by their physicist father:

http://qisforquantum.org/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074DYJTKN/

About the Book

COMPUTING. ENTANGLEMENT. REALITY. Books containing these three words are typically fluff or incomprehensible; this one is not. “Q is for Quantum” teaches a theory at the forefront of modern physics to an audience presumed to already know only basic arithmetic.

FWIW, the event-based metaphysics of Process Philosophy appear to be wholly consistent with Julian Barbour's theory of time. I suppose that both are basically relativism at its peak: there are very few absolutes left.

What's your background? I'd probably start with math (sorry). Calculus and linear algebra.

Then Griffiths is probably to go-to intro text book. Though I never really got it until I read Sakurai. I'm not sure where to go for calculus and linear algebra self-study. Perhaps others can suggest.


http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-2nd-Edition/dp/0131118927


http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Quantum-Mechanics-2nd-Edition/dp/0805382917

This is an interesting book with a different perspective

> Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist.

I think his point is that they are kind of the same thing. Some other physicists https://www.amazon.com/End-Time-Next-Revolution-Physics/dp/0195145925 have argued what I perceive to be a similar concept. Essentially time doesn't exist in the way we colloquially think about it. There is only the relative configuration of all particles and energies in the universe and that tends to move from low to high entropy (over time, for lack of a better way of putting it.).

Serious question: what makes you say these are the "standard route"?

[Griffith on electromagnitism] (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-Edition-David-Griffiths/dp/0321856562/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407283809&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Griffith+electromagnism)

[Griffith on quantum mechanics] (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-2nd-Edition/dp/0131118927/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1407283809&sr=8-2-fkmr0&keywords=Griffith+electromagnism)

[Jackson on electromagnetism] (http://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Third-Edition-Jackson/dp/047130932X/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407283929&sr=8-1&keywords=jackson+electromagnetism)

[Sakurai on quantum mechanics] (http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Quantum-Mechanics-2nd-Edition/dp/0805382917/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=081X3T6SB9XHEZWNTVNB)