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quantum mechanics books

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 09:58:17 2020 No.11925593 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11925611 >>11925638 >>11925717 >>11925723 >>11927397 >>11927431 >>11928729 >>11930548

three options

1. griffiths textbook (pic related)
2. feynman lectures (six easy piece + six not so easy pieces)
3. 'theoretical minimum' books by leonard susskind

can anyone comment on which is more appropriate for somebody in my position:

- basic mathematics knowledge (good with calculus)
- hates pop-sci books that use analogies and stories instead of just explaining the science
- more interested in concepts than technical details

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:09:09 No.11925611 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925593
>hates pop-sci books that use analogies and stories instead of just explaining the science
Then those are the wrong books for you.
Maybe try reading
http://93.174.95.29/main/8EAF90E82D791B87B180ACFCB475FFA6

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:17:48 No.11925638 Report

Quoted By: >>11925669

>>11925593
Of the three you listed, Feynman. Griffiths should be fine but I just personally didn't like it.
However, I'd suggest that Dirac's book is a better fit for those criteria and so is Bohm's (especially the third criterion).

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:42:17 No.11925669 Report

Quoted By: >>11925685 >>11930994

>>11925638
I've just looked up Dirac's book. A lot of people saying it was written for those who already know physics but not QM, and is generally too dense to work as an intro....

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:51:39 No.11925685 Report

Quoted By: >>11925688

>>11925669
I didn't realise you had no physics knowledge. I found Dirac an excellent introduction, but in the case that you have no physics knowledge then Griffiths should be immediately disqualified too.
I think the Feynman lectures are the best for you then.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:57:14 No.11925688 Report

Quoted By: >>11925710

>>11925685
different anon here. what if I'm a math person (I know all that Hilbert space stuff) and I know lagrangian/hamiltonian mechanics and very basic electrodynamics. what should I read to get into QM?

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 10:58:30 No.11925691 Report

Quoted By:

read quantum chem books, they are of a higher quality and more useful

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 11:09:04 No.11925710 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925688
Dirac and Bohm are the best introductions in my opinion. I'm not sure how quantum mechanics wouldn't naturally come up in Hamiltonian mechanics though. The whole analogy with two variables not being able to both be canonical is equivalent to them not being simultaneously observable and pretty much every result in Hamiltonian mechanics has a direct quantum analogue so you'll probably find the whole thing familiar.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 11:12:32 No.11925717 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925593
I liked Cohen-Tannoudji.
Griffiths is too simplistic.

But I now saw that you're not studying Physics, and you just want a more correct intuition on the subject without actually studying it. There's a small book written by Susskind whose goal is to accomplish that.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 11:18:42 No.11925723 Report

Quoted By: >>11926299

>>11925593
>good with calculus
You don’t know even remotely enough math to understand QM lmao. Try learning classical mechanics first l. If you want to understand it beyond toy models you need functional analysis, vector calc, probability theory and diff eq.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 16:01:23 No.11926299 Report

Quoted By: >>11927409

>>11925723
this is wrong. if you can't explain the concepts without resorting to full mathematical models you don't understand qm at all. sakura is the best textbook by the way.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 20:47:06 No.11927384 Report

Quoted By:

Read Penrose then Feynman

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 20:48:32 No.11927397 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925593
for intro quantum use townsend
griffiths sucks, feynman isn't the best intro anymore
townsend->shankar->sakurai

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 20:50:57 No.11927409 Report

Quoted By:

>>11926299
Fake and gay. Suck a dick and die pseud faggot.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 20:52:15 No.11927419 Report

Quoted By:

>hates pop-sci books that use analogies and stories instead of just explaining the science
>more interested in concepts than technical details
the bitter truth is that the concepts themselves are just analogies. Quantum mechanics is a simplistic model of the world that kind of works, as long as you neglect a lot of things it can explain some simple systems.
You won't find anything deeper than surface level charicatures of reality without the nitty-gritty mathematics.
Just get over it and get ready to learn more math.

Anonymous

Anonymous Wed 22 Jul 2020 20:54:17 No.11927431 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925593
>hates pop-sci books
>theoretical minimum
>feynman
>griffiths
lol all of these are borderline popsci. susskind is a good lecturer but those books are trash and for non-academics. Hall's QT for Mathematicians is nice, as well as Morin's notes on Waves (his last quantum chapter) and obviously sakurai

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 03:40:47 No.11928729 Report

Quoted By: >>11928767

>>11925593
Susskind was good for review, probably terrible for learning.

Griffiths is fine but if you actually _DO_ quantum mechanics you'll have to unlearn all the wave mechanics crap and do matrices. Matrices are on computers.

Feynman lectures vol 3 is great, but again a bad place to learn for the first time.

Anyone saying Dirac forgot how hard things are.
REAL ANSWER: You can't learn this stuff without doing it. If you want to commodify it, go ahead, your understanding will reflect that. The best thing to do from your list would probably be to buy Griffiths and DO the problems. Can you code? Coding a 1D SWE with periodic boundary conditions is easy.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 03:56:20 No.11928767 Report

Quoted By: >>11928787

>>11928729
what a retarded answer, no one starts by doing computational QM on a fucking computer. you start with something pleb tier like Griffiths then you move on to Shankar or Sakurai, Landau and Lifshitz and then you move on to the actual research level literature. the only common thread OP should pick up on is the fact that QM is a mathematically grounded theory and even worse than relativity cannot be properly understood unless you know the math, the experiments, and have some strong physical intuition from classical mechanics.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 04:04:45 No.11928787 Report

Quoted By: >>11928824

>>11928767
> no one starts by doing computational QM on a fucking computer
"They" definitely do. I think you're confusing the way institutions are taught to teach you vs what can be done.

If I'm learning something new, I try to code it up. If I can reproduce arguments in books with a plot, I'm on the way to understanding.

But sure, "retarded" is fine, too. I'm sure your advice for learning a language would be to read the text book, read the grammar book, then read a comic book in the language, instead of trying to have a broken conversation with someone.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 04:16:59 No.11928824 Report

Quoted By: >>11928864

>>11928787
>I try to code it up
you would need to learn the physical theory and mathematics to know if you were even doing anything worthwhile, you would need to know how to interpret the foundational results in the experimental side of things and you'd need to talk with, converse with in the native tongue :^), actual physicists. Not everything can be understood from toying around in physics engines.

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 04:27:27 No.11928864 Report

Quoted By: >>11928955

>>11928824

Let's break it down.

> you would need to learn the physical theory and mathematics
This isn't two different things. OP asked for a book on intro QM, he WILL need math and the whole point is to learn the physical theory.
> to know if you were even doing anything worthwhile,
Things like 'worthwhile' are meaningless. He's curious, end of story. No justification needed.
> you would need to know how to interpret the foundational results in the experimental side of things
he's trying to understand basic intro Quantum Mechanics, a field with 100 years of confirmed experiments and well documented numerical routines, simple problems, etc.
> and you'd need to talk with, converse with in the native tongue :^), actual physicists.
He can do that online, and is right now.
> Not everything can be understood from toying around in physics engines.
But well documented intro concepts can.

OP isn't trying to solve the mysteries of the universe, he's trying to understand basic intro Quantum Mechanics.
You're bent on making this a high level problem and listing off your erudite, insider knowledge of graduate level book names and abstract concepts like 'worthwhile'. There's no need to be esoteric when the dude just wants some advice on the basics.

TL;DR OP, this dude is bitter and gate keeping. Here's the ONLY punchline: Buy a book, know that one book will never be satisfactory, Google the shit out of everything, copy some dude's code and see if you can make a simple problem work (particle in a box, simple harmonic oscillator).

Good luck!

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 04:50:03 No.11928955 Report

Quoted By:

>>11928864
u r a mega queer, I never told him he could not learn anything. I don't even agree that you should start with something more advanced than Feynman in fact that's exactly the place to gain preliminary intuition. What I will not deviate from is the correct view that you must absolutely learn the math and the experimental history, the physical intuition including classical mechanics to understand QM otherwise you will gain nothing. Everything else, up to and including toying around in physics engines, is just superficiality.
>code it up
without understanding the fucking math behind it why would you even do that?

Anonymous

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Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 16:04:22 No.11930548 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925593

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 23 Jul 2020 18:24:37 No.11930994 Report

Quoted By:

>>11925669
>who already know physics but not QM
Then there is no point in reading QM lmao
Basic QM inevitably connects with real world through EM, the fuck will you do when it will talk about angular momentum or spin-orbital coupling in magnetic fields
It's like reading category theory without having no understanding of basic algebraic topology and commutative algebra
You have to have a solid grasp on general physics, almost every subarea will pop up eventually in QM

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