Does anyone have a book they can recommend that explains the actual math of quantum mechanics? Once I actually see the equations, things always start making sense to me. For example, my introductory modern physics course talked about the Schroedinger equation and had an optional section on operators and wave functions. Having suffered through Fourier analysis in my electrical engineering courses, the way the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from the application of transformations to wave functions made a kind of intuitive sense. I know an awful lot of math—and am very good at it—so I want to find some way of understanding modern physics on the level of mathematical formalization other than taking lots of physics courses in a university. I could try reading university physics textbooks, I guess, but I’m worried about what they might assume I already know; you can’t Google the symbol for a partial derivative in order to find out what it means.
Does anyone have a book they can recommend that explains the actual math of quantum mechanics?
You could try “The structure and interpretation of quantum mechanics” by R I G Hughes or “The Interpretation of quantum mechanics” by Roland Omnes. Either has enough math to articulate the problem.
I also really liked “Quantum mechanics and experience” by David Z Albert—it was this book that led me to realize that many-worlds is obviously true (as it now seems to me). Albert himself does not believe in many-worlds but he explains it really well.
I’m now working through the university physics texts because none of the above cover relativistic QM. They physics texts though are—to a man—in the “shut up and calculate” school of thought. It is claimed that many a promising physicist has disappeared down the rat-hole of the philosophical interpretation of QM.
You may also enjoy “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down” by Robert Laughlin. He argues that so-called fundamental physics is just the lowest layer of emergent froth that we are able to see. Quantum Field Theory shows that “empty space” is full of stuff for example.
Does anyone have a book they can recommend that explains the actual math of quantum mechanics? Once I actually see the equations, things always start making sense to me. For example, my introductory modern physics course talked about the Schroedinger equation and had an optional section on operators and wave functions. Having suffered through Fourier analysis in my electrical engineering courses, the way the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from the application of transformations to wave functions made a kind of intuitive sense. I know an awful lot of math—and am very good at it—so I want to find some way of understanding modern physics on the level of mathematical formalization other than taking lots of physics courses in a university. I could try reading university physics textbooks, I guess, but I’m worried about what they might assume I already know; you can’t Google the symbol for a partial derivative in order to find out what it means.
You could try “The structure and interpretation of quantum mechanics” by R I G Hughes or “The Interpretation of quantum mechanics” by Roland Omnes. Either has enough math to articulate the problem.
I also really liked “Quantum mechanics and experience” by David Z Albert—it was this book that led me to realize that many-worlds is obviously true (as it now seems to me). Albert himself does not believe in many-worlds but he explains it really well.
I’m now working through the university physics texts because none of the above cover relativistic QM. They physics texts though are—to a man—in the “shut up and calculate” school of thought. It is claimed that many a promising physicist has disappeared down the rat-hole of the philosophical interpretation of QM.
You may also enjoy “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down” by Robert Laughlin. He argues that so-called fundamental physics is just the lowest layer of emergent froth that we are able to see. Quantum Field Theory shows that “empty space” is full of stuff for example.