>>11565952>So basically the result is very mysterious, and everyone is introduced to the problem with an idealized straw experiment that's never been performed. Wow, great way to get some fresh takes on the subject and not be damned to the same mystification forever.Yeah, I get where you're coming from. For something as crazy as quantum mechanics, you need to be dead certain it is true, otherwise you will think it's a conspiracy of physicists to say crazy nonsense. Feynman's Lectures III, Dirac's "Principles of Quantum Mechanics", and Landau and Lifschitz "Quantum Mechanics" are the best to read, in this order or simultaneously, all the other books just repeat material found in these, less comprehesively and with worse intuition. But you should also learn about the old Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization, to understand how the theory was discovered. One way is to go to "Old Quantum Theory", "Adiabatic Invariant", "Matrix Mechanics" pages on Wikipedia, and perhaps Ter-Haar's "The Old Quantum Theory" for a monograph length exposition. The old quantum theory doesn't take long--- it's one rule about quantizing the action variable. But there are insights here, the adiabatic invariance of the action, the quick semiclassiclal rules for number of quantum states, the estimates for the size of off-diagonal matrix elements for X and P operators in the energy representation in quantized versions of classical non-chaotic systems, that are very difficult to get to starting with the other more modern formulations. To complete the quantum mechanics education, you need to understand the Everett interpretation, this can be done by reading Everett's paper, or the book "The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", along with the relevant Wikipedia pages. The whole project takes a few months, if you are dedicated.
