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Reddit mentions of Quantum Mechanics

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We found 10 Reddit mentions of Quantum Mechanics. Here are the top ones.

Quantum Mechanics
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Found 10 comments on Quantum Mechanics:

u/dargscisyhp · 7 pointsr/AskScienceDiscussion

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.

u/SingleMonad · 6 pointsr/Physics

For this whole discussion, I'm going to stipulate to the Copenhagen Interpretation and wavefunction collapse. There are alternatives, but you asked specifically about this one.

It depends on the measurement. Say you go to observe a particle in the infinite square well, and you've arranged your observation so that when you look, you only look in the 'right' half of the well (the region L/2 < x < L). Imagine further that the state Ψ before measurement is a general superposition of energy eigenstates, with non-zero probability amplitude in both halves. And then you look in the right half, and you don't see the particle. What is the wavefunction now? It can't be a delta function. If it were, where would the delta function peak be?

The answer is contained in an axiom (see chapter III of of Claude Cohen-Tannoudji's Quantum Mechanics, or chapter 4 of Shankar's):
Immediately after measurement, the new wavefunction is Ψ1 = ℙ Ψ, where ℙ is the projector onto the eigenspace corresponding to the result of your measurement (and in the non-delta function cases, suitably renormalized to unit probability, i.e., so that < Ψ1 | Ψ1 > = 1).

So how does that work for the half-a-box measurement? The operator A for that measurement is something like

A = a ℙL + b ℙR.

A is a sum of two projectors, ℙL for the 'left' side (0<x<L/2), and ℙR for the 'right' (L/2<x<L). The coefficients a and b are the measurement eigenvalues corresponding to the different measurement outcomes. We don't need them, but I included them for completeness. Notice that ℙL+ ℙR is the identity operator. The particle is either in the left or right side, no other possibilities exist. This is in accord with another postulate: that the eigenvectors of any observable form a complete basis of the state space.

This just looks awful right? But don't worry, we're almost there. Because, by the postulate, the new (post-measurement) wave function is

1> = ℙL| Ψ >.

How did I get that? We measured that the particle wasn't in the right well. Therefore it must be in the left. Our measurement outcome was "it's in the left well." The projector onto the corresponding eigenspace is ℙL.

Now, what does it look like in position representation? Well first we need the projector
L = ∫L/2 dx |x> <x|.

Then we need the new wavefunction Ψ1:

| Ψ1 > = ℙL | Ψ > = integral dx' from 0 to L/2 of | x' > < x' | Ψ >, or

| Ψ1 > = integral dx' from 0 to L/2 of Ψ(x') |x'>.

Then we need the position representation of Ψ1, which is

Ψ1(x) = < x | Ψ1 > = integral dx' from 0 to L/2 of Ψ(x') <x|x'>.

Now, <x|x'> is δ(x-x'), i.e. infinite (that special infinity that integrates to 1) when x=x' and 0 otherwise. So we can do this integral! We just get the integrand when the δ function is infinite, and 0 otherwise.

So Ψ1(x) is equal to our starting wavefunction Ψ(x), so long as x is within range of the integral (0,L/2). If x is outside that range, Ψ1(x) = 0.

Finally(!), let's interpret this. We measured that the particle wasn't in the right side. The post-measurement (collapsed) wavefunction is zero in the right side, but unchanged (except for a renormalization) in the left!

TL;DR: Find the projector corresponding to your measurement outcome. Apply it to your pre-measurement wave function (and maybe do some normalization). That's the post-measurement wave function.

edit: getting thesubscripts right, and maybe the ∫L/2 dx too.

u/mathwanker · 3 pointsr/Physics

Try Baym's book or Cohen-Tannoudji's two-volume set.

u/nitrogentriiodide · 3 pointsr/askscience

I know this isn't what you requested, but as a high schooler, I enjoyed In Search of Schödinger's Cat.

The top level presentations on QM are very light on math, and anything below that brings out heavy linear algebra, differential equations, calculus, etc. So you've probably got that top level covered, and now you need to start solving problems. You could get credit for your efforts by picking one of the undergrad versions of QM from the Chemistry and/or the Physics depts.

I took the chemistry route, so we used Atkins, Cohen-Tanoudji, etc. For all the classes that I took and TA'd, the professor might recommend a book, but rarely reference it.

u/k-selectride · 2 pointsr/Physics

I would try Landau and Lifshitz. Their treatment of scattering is heavily influenced by Regge theory which was huge back then, so they spent a lot of time on it.

For perturbation theory, I would try Cohen-Tannoudji. It's very detailed, about 260 pages with detailed examples (probably the same ones you've seen before, hyperfine splitting etc). The scattering section isn't as long, but probably worth checking out.

u/The_MPC · 2 pointsr/Physics

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
u/WhataBeautifulPodunk · 2 pointsr/Physics

Quantum

Easy: Zettili, Comprehensive reference: Cohen-Tannoudji

or if you want more foundational books

Easy: Schumacher and Westmoreland, Comprehensive: Ballentine

u/dsafish · 1 pointr/Physics

Check out Cohen, very cleared and it's structured so you can go as deep as you want into a subject.

u/schrodingasdawg · 1 pointr/quantum

You might want to consider whether you really want to insinuate an equivalence between science and theology, and whether you want to put the word expertise in quotes. If you think that you're equipped to point out glaring logical holes in quantum mechanics, well, there isn't exactly an equivalent to the Bible in physics (it'd contradict the scientific enterprise to have one), but there are a few standard textbooks on quantum mechanics you can choose from.

Shankar's Principles of Quantum Mechanics

Cohen-Tannoudji et al., Quantum Mechanics

Sakurai and Napolitano, Modern Quantum Mechanics

Landau and Lifshitz, Quantum Mechanics

I recommend Shankar of the four, but you can pick any you want. Unfortunately, textbooks are a bit pricey, but I'm sure your local university's library has a copy you could borrow. Try reading through one of them and picking out any glaring logical holes you can find.

It wouldn't be fair to try to look for logical holes in pop-sci articles you find on the internet instead. These are notorious for being wildly inaccurate. They say outlandish things because that's what gets clicks.

And I'll leave you with one last thought. (I'm not going to continue this conversation further afterwards.) The meaning of the world "realism" is context-dependent. Do you believe numbers are real, that they exist independently of human thought? Then you're a realist about numbers. If not, then you're a non-realist. Do you believe colors, sounds, tastes, etc., exist in objects themselves, or do you think they're merely in our heads? (Or perhaps that they're properties of our interactions with things, rather than inherent properties of things?) You might be a realist or non-realist about sensory properties.

When talking about quantum mechanics, non-realism or anti-realism refers to denying the reality of two things specifically: hidden variables, and the wave function. Non-realists still believe their measurements are real, that the experiments they do are real, that the objects they study are real, that the world they live in is real, and so on. But they believe that position, momentum, energy, etc., are properties of measurement events rather than of microscopic objects. And they believe that wave functions are artificial constructions for keeping track of information, rather than something out there in the world. They don't believe that there is no reality at all.

Realists by contrast believe in either the reality of the wave function, or of hidden variables. (Actually, realists kind of have to believe in the reality of the wave function now, thanks to recent ontology theorems.)

You're quite adamantly opposed to the position that no objective reality exists at all, but you're arguing against a position no-one actually holds. This kind of thing is exactly why I say you need to take a step back and consider whether you actually grasp the beliefs you're claiming to argue against.