Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- NOTATION
- 1 HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
- 2 PARTICLE STATES IN A CENTRAL POTENTIAL
- 3 GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
- 4 SPIN ET CETERA
- 5 APPROXIMATIONS FOR ENERGY EIGENVALUES
- 6 APPROXIMATIONS FOR TIME-DEPENDENT PROBLEMS
- 7 POTENTIAL SCATTERING
- 8 GENERAL SCATTERING THEORY
- 9 THE CANONICAL FORMALISM
- 10 CHARGED PARTICLES IN ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS
- 11 THE QUANTUM THEORY OF RADIATION
- 12 ENTANGLEMENT
- AUTHOR INDEX
- SUBJECT INDEX
PREFACE
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- NOTATION
- 1 HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
- 2 PARTICLE STATES IN A CENTRAL POTENTIAL
- 3 GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
- 4 SPIN ET CETERA
- 5 APPROXIMATIONS FOR ENERGY EIGENVALUES
- 6 APPROXIMATIONS FOR TIME-DEPENDENT PROBLEMS
- 7 POTENTIAL SCATTERING
- 8 GENERAL SCATTERING THEORY
- 9 THE CANONICAL FORMALISM
- 10 CHARGED PARTICLES IN ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS
- 11 THE QUANTUM THEORY OF RADIATION
- 12 ENTANGLEMENT
- AUTHOR INDEX
- SUBJECT INDEX
Summary
The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well.
There are many fine books on quantum mechanics, including those by Dirac and Schiff from which I learned the subject a long time ago. Still, when I have taught the subject as a one-year graduate course, I found that none of these books quite fit what I wanted to cover. For one thing, I like to give a much greater emphasis than usual to principles of symmetry, including their role in motivating commutation rules. (With this approach the canonical formalism is not needed for most purposes, so a systematic treatment of this formalism is delayed until Chapter 9.) Also, I cover some modern topics that of course could not have been treated in the books of long ago, including numerous examples from elementary particle physics, alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, and a brief (very brief) introduction to the theory and experimental tests of entanglement and its application in quantum computation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Lectures on Quantum Mechanics , pp. xv - xviiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012