Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

This book will appeal to people who, like me, have dabbled in many ways with quantum theory over the years and read many books on it but perhaps never before found anything so clear, authoritative, mathematically sound, and free of blather about how quantum theory defies what seems to pass for common sense along lay readers. The mathematical level will challenge readers lacking prior acquaintance with algebra, calculus, vectors and matrices, complex numbers, and classical mechanics, but this is after all the basic toolkit for anyone seeking to get a serious grip on what makes quantum mechanics tick. Apart from that, the humility that comes with advancing age and a wry sense of humor will suffice to carry you through this engaging little book. Leonard Susskind obviously knows the theory as well as anyone, intimately, and has evidently taught it often enough to know exactly know to optimize his approach. He prepares the ground carefully and uses the qubits representing spin as his main running example, which lets him avoid murky issues around particles and waves for most of the discussion. He also works in Dirac algebra from the start, which is far and away the clearest approach for my money and provides a solid base to discuss the respective approaches and main results of Heisenberg and Schrödinger, when he gets that far. I found his treatment far more enlightening than that in volume 3 of the Feynman lectures, where Feynman made a mess of presenting Dirac algebra and failed to motivate either matrix mechanics or wave mechanics with sufficient mathematical or philosophical care. Susskind has properly taken on board the depth of the foundation work needed to present quantum theory intelligibly, so as not to be shipwrecked on the rocks of the paradoxes that lead weaker heads to despair about ever making sense of their challenge to what used to pass for common sense about physical reality. His discussion of states and state vectors, basic principles, entanglement, uncertainty, nonlocality, dynamics and so on is always spot on, with a confident mathematical grip on the issues and a calm refusal to be ruffled by the difficulties they present to intuitive comprehension. His approach is ideally suited to showing how and where quantum logic defies classical logic, how far you can go before deep issues about spacetime need to be confronted, for example by going from discrete sums to continuous integrals, and how little you need to fuss about particle and waves before the new foundations are in place. A modern introduction to quantum mechanics needs to go beyond Dirac's elegant but dated and difficult textbook, both in terms of approach to set things up for new work in quantum computation and high energy physics and in terms of content to touch on such topics as the Bell inequalities, the trials of Alice and Bob, and the creation and annihilation operators of quantum field theory. Susskind does all this with masterly cool, as well as a warm appreciation of the excitement in wait for people who go on to tackle those further topics. Art Friedman has made sure the text remains accessible to plodders like me, though perhaps some of his humorous additions might be trimmed or deleted in future editions of what seems to me to be a core text with a long and glorious potential afterlife.

These series of books are by far my favourite science books. Ever. Having read the classical mechanics book, I was extremely excited when this was released. I would warn though that it is not for the light-hearted. The Theoretical Minimum books are filled completely with equations and if your mathematics isn't up to scratch you wont get past the second lecture. Having said this, if you wan't to start understanding science; real science that is, not like the science of pop science books where you're told a few vague ideas and some rough history. Rather, this book takes you into the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics and allows you to do the calculations and discover the true beauty of the equations. Before reading this book my background in mathematics and physics were as follows: GCSE and AS level maths and physics, had read the first book. I don't think you will struggle to read this provided that you're willing to work fairly hard at understanding what's going on and that you have a working knowledge of calculus and a basic knowledge of matrix operations and knowledge of complex numbers. The book covers a variety of topics and by the end of it you will understand the basics of the Schrödinger equation, general uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, using quantum mechanics to calculate probabilities of certain outcomes and also quantum entanglement and why it's such a strange phenomena. These ideas are not made readily available, you will have to do a fair bit of work in understanding in order to fully appreciate these ideas. It took me about 3 months to read and understand this book and I feel that I have a basic grasp on some fundamental ideas in quantum mechanics. If you have no serious understanding of the maths of physics or have no interest in learning it then this book is not for you. If you do not want to have to think about the ideas presented in order to grasp their importance then this book is also not for you. However if you want an invitation into the world of real quantum mechanical theory then this is the book for you.

Great book, very informative.

I've been working through this book. I learned quantum in my undergrad years from the Tannoudji book. It was very dry and I spend most my time trying to figure out what he (Tannoudji) was trying to say, THEN figure out whether I can prove it, etc. Funny how really smart people can create creatively new ways to make stuff more difficult through weird explanations. This is not so with Susskind. Susskind writes like Feynman: clear explanations on complex topics. I assume he's a native english speaker, as his tone is very colloquial and uninimtidating. He assumes the reader knows nothing of quantum and explains things in bit-sized pieces which are easy to digest. He rarely says things like "well OBVIOUSLY this flows from this" (when the things are so obvious). Anyways, the book is a bit unorthodox. It starts off talking about spin states and vector spaces. This is different than the typical quantum books that start off with talking about solving the Schrodinger equation. Which, now that I think about it, isn't really a great place to start. It's a wave equation that's only once-piece of the bigger picture. The result is a book that has a very gradual learning curve. That said, readers still need a bit of math background if they want to get through this book. I'd say at least a decent understanding of complex numbers and matrix algebra are a prerequisite. Both those subjects are thoroughly explained in places online (Khan Academy) for free. SOLUTIONS: I read another reviewer rate the book low because there is a lack of worked out solutions. That I disagree with. Google search "Quantum theoretical minimum solutions" and they will pop up. There are several unofficial sites out there that have answers to the solutions. For instance, google search "the uncertain biscuit quantum" or "chris brittain quantum". The solutions are out there. Also, on that note, the problems in this book are few..but concise and great. Very on-point. Regarding the reviewers who are rating this book low b/c it's too difficult. That's not really a good reason to rate a QUANTUM book low. For two reasons (1) it's a quantum book for christsakes. it is by far the most math-friendly book written on the subject. reading about quantum mechanics without math is not "doing" physics..it's just cataloging knowledge (e.g. stamp collecting), (2) how can you rate a book low if you don't understand it? What are your reviewing parameters? If you have a little complex number knowledge and rudimentary matrix operations (e.g. matrix multiplication, etc.) under your belt, you'll be fine. The Kindle version is fine. That's what I bought (I have a paper copy too). I prefer the kindle version because I can read it on my phone while waiting in line, etc. The equations come out fine (I'm not sure what the other revieweres were complaining about, I'm reading it on my iPhone 5s just fine.) If you know nothing of quantum and want to learn, I highly HIGHLY recommend this book.

The book begins with simple and accessible language and increases in difficulty according to the theme, without ever losing clarity. In it, many scholars find new themes of mathematics and physics to be studied. The book together with the course that Professor Leonard Susskind and Stanford University make available for free on YouTube (in English) is enough to begin to understand the immensity of this theme that is applied to everything we use in our day to day, both in electronics as in medicine. Anyone who thinks that Quantum Mechanics is only theoretical is wrong. So, don't think twice, buy the book and watch the 10 classes of 2 hours each on YouTube for free and start understanding more advanced books on the subject.

Una excelente y peculiar introducción a la mecánica cuántica, con la participación de Leonard Susskind, uno de los padres de la teoría de cuerdas. El texto es relativamente sencillo, pero riguroso. Hay que tener en cuenta de que libro va dirigido a personas que tengan una cierta formación científica-matemática. Yo diría como mínimo un estudiante de ciencias (física, química, matemáticas) de 2º curso. Se necesita también cierto nivel de inglés. Aunque este libro está traducido, yo la que tengo es la versión en el idioma original. Desconozco si la versión traducida al castellano es buena o no. Las lecciones vienen con bastantes ejercicios, que no vienen resueltos en el libro, aunque hay un página web con las soluciones donde se pueden comprobar los resultados. No recuerdo la dirección de la página ahora, pero no es difícil encontrar.

Mycket bra bok som kräver eftertanke. Ingen snabbläsning