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I meant the discussion in the intro courses; Griffiths just plonks down the Schrodinger equation on page one and you just have to eat it. In contrast a textboo

I meant the discussion in the intro courses; Griffiths just plonks down the Schrodinger equation on page one and you just have to eat it. In contrast a textbook about thermodynamics will be all steam engines at the start, or maybe talk about a thermometer. Solid, sensible things and no talk about Gibbs free energy or any of the deep theory that exists. You could start a QM book talking about the double slit experiment, but would have to write a lot of "one interpretation" and "some views say this". Or you could just brazenly pretend there is no controversy and make every reader that knows of it very suspicious indeed.

andrepd 8y ago
>You could start a QM book talking about the double slit experiment That is indeed how my favorite QM book starts: Cohen-Tannoudji. See also Landau for one that starts from experiment and not theory.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  Yes, but it quickly cuts to the meat :-) (I mean C-T/D/L, that’s the book I was talking about in a sibling comment)
kgwgk 8y ago
I’m not familiar with that book. I learnt QM from a 2-volume, 1500 pages book that gives you Schroedinger’s equation 10 pages in. But that book made no claim of being “introductory” and I previously had a “quantum physics” course including the different things that lead to Schroedinger’s equation (Plank, Rutherford, Bohr, etc). In any case introductory books that discuss the physics and not just the mathematics do also exist, like vol 3 in Feynman’s lectures. Edit: I’m looking at Griffiths’ book and after defining Schroedinger’s equation in section 1.1 he devotes three pages to discussing its statistical interpretation in section 1.2 and mentions different interpretations, the Bell inequalities and the measurement problem. He comes back to these philosophical issues at the end of the book in a 12-page afterword.

andrepd 8y ago

>You could start a QM book talking about the double slit experiment That is indeed how my favorite QM book starts: Cohen-Tannoudji. See also Landau for one that starts from experiment and not theory.

kgwgk 8y ago
Yes, but it quickly cuts to the meat :-) (I mean C-T/D/L, that’s the book I was talking about in a sibling comment)

kgwgk 8y ago

I’m not familiar with that book. I learnt QM from a 2-volume, 1500 pages book that gives you Schroedinger’s equation 10 pages in. But that book made no claim of being “introductory” and I previously had a “quantum physics” course including the different things that lead to Schroedinger’s equation (Plank, Rutherford, Bohr, etc). In any case introductory books that discuss the physics and not just the mathematics do also exist, like vol 3 in Feynman’s lectures. Edit: I’m looking at Griffiths’ book and after defining Schroedinger’s equation in section 1.1 he devotes three pages to discussing its statistical interpretation in section 1.2 and mentions different interpretations, the Bell inequalities and the measurement problem. He comes back to these philosophical issues at the end of the book in a 12-page afterword.