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Where did we get that [Schrödinger's equation] from? It's not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger. -The Feynman
by wyager 11y ago
Where did we get that [Schrödinger's equation] from? It's not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger.
-The Feynman Lectures on Physics
For anyone who wants to study quantum mechanics and has a math background, I strongly recommend Shankar's quantum textbook. It has the most rigorous, clear, and correct derivations I have seen thus far, starting with vector spaces and moving to physical systems only after a hundred or so pages.
- danharaj 11y agoHave you ever read Lectures on Quantum Mechanics for Mathematics Students or Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians? I'd like to know how Shankar's book sits in the space of QM textbooks.
- 77pt77 11y agoShankar is all round a very practical book to pass quals, very poorly structured, highly pretentious by dealing with say parth integrals with grassman variables but doing an awful job at basic stuff such as adding angular momentum. If you've got a math background I'd recommended you skip Shankar even more vehemently than I usually do.
- 77pt77 11y agoFor the love of God, do not use Shankar! The book is just down right atrocious. The fact that it became almost standard in American universities speaks more of the power of networking than anything else. Shankar's book is anything but rigorous, quite on the contrary. There are so many good QM books: For an absolute beginner I'd recommend David Griffiths Dirac's is very readable Sakurai's is very good though a bit advanced Whatever you do, it's difficult to go wrong by not using Shankar's
- foob 11y agoI personally think that Shankar makes a great companion to Sakurai. Shankar is less rigorous but it explains things in a more accessible way which can be extremely helpful if you find Sakurai too terse on some topics.
- randlet 11y agoIt's been a long time now, but I pretty much agree with you. I really enjoyed Griffiths as an introduction but for reasons that escape me now I remember having a bad time with Shankar.
- 77pt77 11y agoGriffiths is not great but for someone completely unfamiliar with the subject it will hold your hand quite nicely and is not pretentious at all. For someone a little more knowledgeable it might get a bit boring...
- qrendel 11y agoThe QM class I originally took used Liboff. I could barely understand a word of it and ended up dropping the class. Later I found the Shankar book and was thrilled with it by comparison. I'm not a math whiz though, so lack of "rigor" on a first pass is just fine by me. For an intro level text for the average person, I found Shankar was one of the few accessible ones. Haven't read Griffiths yet so I can't comment on it.
- subnaught 11y agoGriffiths is really great.
- gaze 11y agoPersonally I love Shankar, and can't stand griffiths.
- wyager 11y agoWhat in the world are you talking about? Griffiths is substantially worse than shankar. Griffiths doesn't even get into Hilbert spaces until chapter three, at which point he delivers a broken and incomprehensible explanation. He attempts to teach Hilbert operators by analogy to the multiplication or application by adjacency people use in normal arithmetic. This is a terrible approach, and confuses the hell out of students who haven't already taken abstract algebra. In what way is Shankar less rigorous than Griffiths?