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Books on Quantum Mechanics?
manjunaths asks: "I would like to ask the physicists here to recommend some books on Quantum Mechanics. For those of us who have a decent background in calculus and have done some advanced physics (field theory, network theory etc.,). The books must have math as well as theoretical explanation. If it has examples which explain/relate to real world physics that would be really nice."
Try Feynman Lectures, Feynman "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces". Most of the physics has not aged from the time the books was written, - QED, relativistic gravitation and the Standard model were almost complete by then. And he had unusual gift for readability and ingenuous practical examples. [I think he won some teaching awards for his books, also.]
:)
w s/feynman .html
That is what I heard - but try to ask some physicist next time
Here is a nifty interview with Feynman (1979):
http://www.omnimag.com/archives/intervie
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
There is absolutely no question. David Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics is by far the best intro book out there. His prose is amazing, his explainations are always interesting and illuminating, and (pehaps best of all), he always gets the math right.
If you haven't poked around in a lot of intro (or "advanced"!) quantum books, you may not realize how important those things (especially the math bit) are. But it wouldn't matter if hadn't read any other books. If you gave them all a fair shot, you'd choose Griffiths because his explanations are just so much better than everyone else's.
Trust me. Griffiths.
Once you've read it, you may be ready for something more advanced (maybe Sakurai, or even the poorly written but still amazingly complete Cohen and Tannoudji, or even Feynman's QED), but nothing compares to Griffiths for a good introduction to Quantum.
Check out here. That's a GPL'ed book a professor at my school (go NM Tech!) has written as an interesting freshman year physics book. It covers some basic QM, amonsgt the other things you usually get freshman year in physics.
:)
In earnest, that book is a work in progress and it's really important to do the problems to get the full meaning from the text.
Hope that helps
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
For undergrad level: "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David J. Griffiths. Griffiths is (IMHO) not only an excellent physics author, he is that rarest of textbook authors, one who remembers that a physics book is a BOOK, and thus should be enjoyable to read, as well as get the physics and math right. Any textbook that is boring to read is a failure as a book. Get ahold of his textbook on Electricity and Magnetism; how many physics textbooks make you burst into laughter? "Physics of Atoms and Molecules" by B.H. Bransden and C.J. Joachain Also quite readable, with lots of experimental stuff related to, well, atoms and molecules. Graduate Level: "Quantum Mechanics" by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Bernard Diu, and Franck Laloe. Somewhat turgid, but complete, thorough, and accessible. Highly theoretical. Practical examples tend to show up more in volume 2. (THICK volumes, too!) HTH.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
But it really depends on YOU, I for one could only learn scattering from Landau, but found the book less than perfect for many other topics. Others in my class had quite the opposite reaction. It depends on what "clicks" for you, and how deep you want to go into what topics.
Balam
Quantum Theory This is Bohm's book. This is simply the best QM book ever written. You'll need Fourier analysis. If you are really interested in learning QM, that requirement will give you more confidence in this book, not less.
I'm sure you've heard of the EPR (sometimes called EPR-Bohm) experiments. The last chapters (and best chapters) of the book are where Bohm lays out his idea for an experiment to actually test EPR -- which is more or less the method used today. (written around 1952, I believe. The experiments weren't conducted until the 1980's.)
Although Bohm's book is one of the best defenses of orthodox quantum mechanics, Bohm went on to propose a non-local, hidden variable version of QM several years after writing the textbook. This theory turned out to have been mathematically identical to de Broglie's pilot wave formulation, which he had thrown out because he thought that non-local EPR effects were obviously impossible. Here is a page with introductions: Intros. Learn the orthodox theory first.
This one. (Ducks)
Don't you know that because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the more you read about quantum physics, the less you can actually know about it? Stupid Heisenberg...
And which are absolutely excellent to give you a very solid grounding in quantum mechanics and quantum physics.
Mandl's Quantum Mechanics in the Manchester Physics Series
Gasiorowicz's Quantum Physics is absolutely excellent. It goes from simple stuff to pretty complicated stuff and tends to cover things in a thorough, 'no-fudge' way so that you have a solid perspective of how it should be done
Eisberg and Resnick's "Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles" is good for bringing it all together with atomic physics, nuclear physics and particle physics
Bransden and Joachain's "Quantum Mechanics" Absolutely excellent. Goes into a LOT of details on everything. If there's anything you don't understand, you're likely to find it here in an understandable form (where other books just mention it in passing, this one will actually spell it out in full, which is well nice when you're in trouble with a concept)
That should get you started pretty well. After that you might want to get Dirac's very own book to seriously absorb the dirac notation (I've found that his book was very clear even so many years after it's been written), then you'll need to get into the subject referred to during my degree as "quantum theory" - basically it is to "normal" quantum mechanics as lagrangian mechanics is to classical mechanics... just much nicer!
Good luck,
Daniel
Carpe Diem
real world examples!
You must have physics confused with some other field...
Have you read the Feynman lectures? Those are basically what you want right there. You descibed them perfectly. The compilation is some of the best QM, and is a required "free time" book for physics people.
I've found that quantum chemistry or solid state books often give a better "real world" account of QM. Something like Atkins Molecular Quantum Mechanics or Levine's Quantum Chemstry covers chemistry and Kittel's Solid State covers the rest.
If particle physics and field quantization is more your thing, depending on your level, you might want to start with something like Griffiths or Gasiorowicz. That's what the basic undergrad book is. If those look too simple, I highly recommend Sakurai. Start with his regular book before you look at the advanced one. You won't get through the advanced book unless you really, really know your stuff, but it covers the most mind-blowing aspects of quantum.
(Disclaimer: I study condensed matter, so I might be biased on what is applicable to the real world)
Oh, one other thing. If you want to learn some quantum, the first thing you have to do is learn what the action, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. You can try to learn it like a chemist does... in ignorance, but you will actually understand what you're doing if you know what those things are first.
Remember, if you're already fast don't eat a Quantum Mechanic, it will only slow you down.
Ranged weapons are a good way of taking them out
And remember, a box with Schroedinger's cat isn't anything special, just a stupid physics joke =).
Eisberg, Resneck - Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, a Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (047187373X) (undergraduate level, introductory)
Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (0805375015) (graduate level, good for matrix mechanics)
French, Taylor - Quantum Physics (?) (Introductory)
The much touted Griffiths is good as well, but is also very terse and doesn't go very much in depth. There is almost no motivation for QM to begin with. I suggest starting with French and Taylor or Eisberg,Resneck. Then read Sakurai before you are ready to go into field theory.
A more advanced book, which also I recommend highly, is the one by Dicke and Wittke. These were my first books on QM (I was initially selftaught as an undergraduate, though I took regular courses later).
I also second the suggestions earlier of Sakurai and Feynman Lectures vol III. The latter is an unconventional introduction in that it starts directly with the Dirac bra-ket notation and Hilbert space, but that is really the way most physicists think about quantum mechanics after their first course, and the sooner you get used to it the better. For more advanced material, the Landau and Lifshitz book is one of the best.
On that subject, Dirac's original book on quantum mechanics is well worth reading too, though it's not thought of as a textbook.
I'm a physicist who specailizes in Quantum Information, so I've read just about every quantum book out there. I would have to agree that it is the all around top cookie in the arena of intro into quantum mechanics books. However, for exactly the reasons that physicists like myself like it, people just getting into quantum mechanics may not.
Quantum Mechanics is a Taoist precept in a way, where only understanding brings understanding.
I think that Griffiths is at its best when you already have some understanding to work with. To bootstrap your self into that place, I would recomend "Quantum Physics" by Stephen Gasiorowicz. Its more compact than Griffiths and so it may be easier to get a big picture view of what Quantum Physics is all about.
I ended up using the Landau and Lifshitz book.
I found Saxon assumed you knew a lot of math theory, especially around special functions. And too much of the "and the derivation is relatively simple" or "since f(x) is arbitrary within wide bounds, it follows that..."
Griffith's is good. Really, Griffith's is the book you'll need for quantum physics from a more 'modern' perspective -- being able to understand the notation of QFT and QCD. (Bohm doesn't use Dirac notation -- a strength -- though he does present both the matrix formulation and the wave formulation. Feynman's integration, of course, is also missing.) Griffith's is indespensible for a student of physics, but for understanding the whats, whys, and wherefores, I'd have to recommend Bohm.
As others have pointed out, the Feynman lectures are probably what you want. But hey, I gotta weigh in with my big physicist ego, and maybe you actually want to solve problems and stuff (which you won't learn from the Feynman lectures [1]), so here goes:
I haven't seen Griffith's QM text, must've been released in the last ten years. I'm not that big a fan of his E&M text. (Purcell is clearer and more elegant.)
Cohen-Tannoudji, which others have recommended, is an encyclopaedic treatment of non-relativistic QM, and was the de facto standard introductory graduate text for a long time. IMO it's very dryly translated from the French and tedious to learn from. If you have to really do this stuff, you'll probably end up with a copy, though. It's all in there.
The raves about Shankar---also newer than my education---on Amazon seriously tempt me.
My favorite introductory QM text for a long time was Liboff. Odd that no one has recommended it yet. Now I really like the underappreciated gem _Quantum Mechanics_ by Amit Goswami (despite the fact he hangs out with Deepak Chopra these days).
Maybe Griffith is better, but based on my appreciation of his E&M text, I seriously doubt it.
The Bohm book is a great bargain in the Dover edition, as is Pauling's book (oriented towards physical chemists) but both are very dated.
[1] Read the introduction or the afterword, where Feynman talks about what a disaster his attempt to teach introductory physics at Caltech turned out to be. And remember that the average student at Caltech is very smart and very motivated, and he was only able to "reach" the top ~10%. The Feynman lectures are marvels in many ways, but they're terrible pedagogy.