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2076 results in Atomic Physics, Molecular Physics and Chemical Physics

Page 24 of 104

  • 3 - The Rules of Quantum Mechanics

  • Eugene D. Commins, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book:
    Quantum Mechanics
    Print publication:
    08 September 2014, pp 28-54

  • Summary

    Statement of the rules

    When the rules of quantum mechanics were formulated, they expressed a revolutionary break with the past. Because they were something totally new, they could not be derived from the old principles of classical theoretical physics, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, gave no predictions or erroneous predictions for many experimental results. Instead, the rules of quantum mechanics had to be obtained by intuition and inspiration from experimental results.

    The first fundamental concept we encounter in formulating the rules is that of a dynamical system. As in classical physics, this usually means an isolated system such as a free electron, free neutron, free molecule, and so on. However, if we assume that quantum mechanics has general validity, it also must apply to macroscopic systems containing vast numbers of particles, and as a practical matter, it is impossible to isolate a macroscopic system from environmental influences, except in very special circumstances.

  • Preface

  • Eugene D. Commins, University of California, Berkeley
  • Book:
    Quantum Mechanics
    Print publication:
    08 September 2014, pp xiii-xiv

  • Summary

    This book developed from lecture notes that I wrote and rewrote while teaching the graduate course in quantum mechanics at Berkeley many times and to many hundreds of students between 1965 and 2010. It joins a crowded field of well-established quantum mechanics texts. I hope that by virtue of its contents and approach, this book may add something distinctive and be of use to physics students and to working physicists.

    I am grateful for the encouragement I have received from scores of Berkeley students and from Berkeley colleagues D. Budker, E. L. Hahn, J. D. Jackson, H. Steiner, M. Suzuki, E. Wichmann, and the late S. J. Freedman, who was once one of my Ph.D. students, then a highly respected colleague, and always a devoted and loyal friend. I thank P. Bucksbaum, A. Cleland, T. Sleator, and H. Stroke for trying out at least part of my lecture notes on students at other institutions and B. C. Regan, D. DeMille, L. Hunter, P. Drell, J. Welch, and I. Ratowsky for their support and friendship. I am sincerely grateful to Vince Higgs, editor at Cambridge University Press, for his crucial encouragement and support. I also thank Sara Werden at Cambridge University Press in New York, and Jayashree, project manager, and her co-workers at Newgen in Chennai, India, for their unfailing courtesy and expert professionalism.

Page 24 of 104