Where to publicise some notes on quantum mechanics

[Peter Hearty]

I've struggled to understand quantum mechanics for many years. I've recently written some notes on the subject that address some of the issues that I've found confusing and that I think might be helpful to others.

The moderators on Physics Forums, quite reasonably, won't allow me to publicise it here as it's not available from a quality, established source.

The basic issues I've tried to cover are.

1. To make the postulates more plausible than is generally done in most introductory textbooks.
2. To explain why complex numbers are necessary.
3. To try to distinguish between the aspects that are distinctively based on physics and the elements that are an inevitable consequence of the mathematical formalism.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good place to make the notes available to others?

 

[vanhees71]

I'd address a scientific publishing company who publish textbooks like Springer, Cambridge/Oxford University Press, World Scientific,...

 

[Peter Hearty]

I'd address a scientific publishing company who publish textbooks like Springer, Cambridge/Oxford University Press, World Scientific,...

Thanks for that, but I should have explained, the notes are only 20 pages long, are intentionally informal and intended as a little extra material to read alongside a conventional QM course. I don't think Springer, CUP/OUP would be interested. I was thinking more of a website that might accept them?

 

[PeroK]

I've struggled to understand quantum mechanics for many years. I've recently written some notes on the subject that address some of the issues that I've found confusing and that I think might be helpful to others.

The moderators on Physics Forums, quite reasonably, won't allow me to publicise it here as it's not available from a quality, established source.

The basic issues I've tried to cover are.

1. To make the postulates more plausible than is generally done in most introductory textbooks.
2. To explain why complex numbers are necessary.
3. To try to distinguish between the aspects that are distinctively based on physics and the elements that are an inevitable consequence of the mathematical formalism.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good place to make the notes available to others?

Take a look at this:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

I imagine you're talking about something in a similar vein?

 

[hilbert2]

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good place to make the notes available to others?

You could rewrite them as a blog, in Wordpress or somewhere else. I have some of my own physics writings in here: www.physicscomputingblog.com

 

[Peter Morgan]

It seems almost certain that arXiv won't be possible, but you could very likely post such a thing to viXra. One version of their "mission statement" is here: http://vixra.org/why. The danger that your efforts will be lost in the noise of other people presenting their ideas is rather extreme, but it is one starting point. Twenty pages don't post to a blog very well. I suggest you start a blog, if you don't already have one, just as a place where no-one will stop you posting things, even if no-one ever looks at it, but choose its name with care, because you'll have to live with it for years.
If we call your OP your "abstract", it looks fairly restrained compared to the sometimes wild claims one can find on viXra, so IMO that seems pretty good.
I suggest you might drop the reference to the complex numbers from your abstract, unless you're sure that it is absolutely fundamental. With apologies, people getting too excited about complex structure always looks a little flakey to me; as I read your third list entry, "distinguish[ing] between the aspects that are distinctively based on physics and the elements that are an inevitable consequence of the mathematical formalism" in any case likely includes any argument you might have as to why it's necessary to use the complex numbers instead of the reals or the quaternions (or the octonions or the sedenions, people can get quite excitable about such things). Can I sell you my argument that it may be less a fundamental matter than because it's convenient to use Fourier analysis and characteristic functions as generating functions for probability densities, which I offer here, admittedly very much too baldly, so you can see how that approach might contrast with your own more than because my argument is right? You can find plenty of other contrasting alternatives if you look hard enough.
Good luck.

 

[vanhees71]

vixra is the worst advice I've ever heard. If it's a serious treatment of standard physics, it's the last place, where you want to post anything. It's not worth the effort to write it up in the first place, because at vixra there's nothing considered science at all. I'd rather follow @hilbert2 's advice in #5.

 

[Peter Morgan]

vixra is the worst advice I've ever heard. If it's a serious treatment of standard physics, it's the last place, where you want to post anything. It's not worth the effort to write it up in the first place, because at vixra there's nothing considered science at all. I'd rather follow @hilbert2 's advice in #5.

That's all true, but if you want to put a PDF somewhere, and your knowledge and writing style is not up to the point of your work being publishable in Am.J.Phys., Eur.J.Phys., ..., which would likely be enough to get you onto arXiv, then viXra is a possibility. Yes, there's an enormous amount of noise, so that I never look at viXra spontaneously, whereas I look at new papers on quant-ph, math-ph, hep-th, and math.QA every day, but if someone were to link to viXra, I would look at their work or not based on their abstract or what they otherwise say, as above, because arXiv really has, in some ways, become very fussy indeed about who they let post there, in other ways not so much. Most viXra papers have such outlandish abstracts that I would never get past the first sentence, whereas the OP here seems to me moderately sensible.
If you, @Peter Hearty, are convinced that you don't want to be tarred with the viXra brush, which as you see above is very broad and perhaps is best avoided, I have sometimes posted links on my blog to papers on dropbox, because Google's blogger doesn't natively support PDFs. I've also copied and pasted from a PDF as images, but that's perhaps not practical for 20 pages.
It is possible to build a following over time on Facebook, for example, where one can include PDFs if you create your own Facebook group or join one, but it takes time and thoughtfulness and one or two missteps can result in people not taking you seriously thereafter. One thing to note is that copyright can be compromised quite badly if you post on commercial websites: if you care about that, you should read the small print.

 

[Peter Hearty]

Take a look at this:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

I imagine you're talking about something in a similar vein?

That's a very interesting web page, and I'm going to go back and read it in more detail, but my aims are much more elementary even than that. I'm just trying to make the postulates seem plausible, not actually formally derive them.

Basically I take simple examples of a random variable (throw of a die, toss of a coin), map the values of the random variable to the basis of a vector space, define the associated measurement operator as the sum of (value times projection operator) and illustrate how the resulting normalised vector components squared can be interpreted as a probability distribution. That's all it is. It's the kind of simple examples that I think are so obvious to most authors of QM texts that they don't even bother to add it in, but I think would have helped me greatly as a solitary student exploring QM for the first time.

 

[Peter Hearty]

It seems almost certain that arXiv won't be possible, but you could very likely post such a thing to viXra. One version of their "mission statement" is here: http://vixra.org/why. The danger that your efforts will be lost in the noise of other people presenting their ideas is rather extreme, but it is one starting point. Twenty pages don't post to a blog very well. I suggest you start a blog, if you don't already have one, just as a place where no-one will stop you posting things, even if no-one ever looks at it, but choose its name with care, because you'll have to live with it for years.
If we call your OP your "abstract", it looks fairly restrained compared to the sometimes wild claims one can find on viXra, so IMO that seems pretty good.
I suggest you might drop the reference to the complex numbers from your abstract, unless you're sure that it is absolutely fundamental. With apologies, people getting too excited about complex structure always looks a little flakey to me; as I read your third list entry, "distinguish[ing] between the aspects that are distinctively based on physics and the elements that are an inevitable consequence of the mathematical formalism" in any case likely includes any argument you might have as to why it's necessary to use the complex numbers instead of the reals or the quaternions (or the octonions or the sedenions, people can get quite excitable about such things). Can I sell you my argument that it may be less a fundamental matter than because it's convenient to use Fourier analysis and characteristic functions as generating functions for probability densities, which I offer here, admittedly very much too baldly, so you can see how that approach might contrast with your own more than because my argument is right? You can find plenty of other contrasting alternatives if you look hard enough.
Good luck.

Thanks very much. I'd never heard of viXra. I'll certainly look at it.

You may be right about the complex numbers. The only reason I wanted to include that was because it was one of the aspects of QM that was a barrier to me making any progress for a long time. The reasoning I included in my note was essentially pragmatic: along the lines of "it doesn't work if you don't" type thing.

 

[PeterDonis]

if you want to put a PDF somewhere, and your knowledge and writing style is not up to the point of your work being publishable in Am.J.Phys., Eur.J.Phys., ..., which would likely be enough to get you onto arXiv, then viXra is a possibility.

You're asking the wrong question. The question is, do you want your work to be taken seriously by actual workers in the field, or not? If you do, then as @vanhees71 said, vixra is the worst place you could possibly post it.

I'd never heard of viXra. I'll certainly look at it.

Please take heed of what I said above before considering this.

 

[atyy]

Thanks very much. I'd never heard of viXra. I'll certainly look at it.

As vanhees71 and PeterDonis have said, this is not a good idea if you are posting serious science.

 

[Peter Morgan]

That book's been on my reading list for some time. One reason, although not a major one, is because of the complex numbers stuff. I presume something else must be used to accommodate the extra degrees of freedom that complex numbers gives, either via multiple simultaneous equations, or perhaps Clifford algebras.

Perhaps I should have said "why complex numbers are used", rather than "needed".

Norsen's Section 5.1 takes the "multiple simultaneous equations" line. Schrödinger's equation is treated and Maxwell's equations in vacuo, but he doesn't discuss the question of "why complex structure" for the abstract formalism as it's given by, say, Heisenberg/Dirac/von Neumann.
The book's preface leads off with "This textbook is intended as a lifeline to physics students (of either the traditional or the autodidactic variety) who have had some preliminary exposure to quantum mechanics but who want to actually try to make physical and conceptual sense of the theory in the same way that they have been trained and expected to do when learning about other areas of physics." Given such a level of audience, it's perhaps too deep a dive to tackle the abstract formalism too mathematically. Why is the tensor product over the complex field, not over the reals, for example?

 

[Peter Morgan]

@Peter Hearty, I've been quite surprised by the vehemence of the antipathy expressed above towards viXra. It seems to me inappropriate to damn a paper so much by association rather than by content, for all that such associations are commonplace. It's unclear to me whether the comments above are expressing their own opinion about viXra or expressing their sense of other physicists' opinions, but I guess I now have to agree that you should think more than twice about posting your paper to viXra as a way to publicize it.

 

[vanhees71]

viXra is simply one example for my feeling that it has been a mistake by Barners-Lee to make the WWW public and not left it to the use of the HEP community alone... ;-)).

 

[A. Neumaier]

it has been a mistake by Barners-Lee to make the WWW public

But only due to this ''mistake'' we are able to have this discussion here...

 

[bolbteppa]

I'm not sure a set of QM notes which tries to stick to normal QM is radical enough for vixra

 

[vanhees71]

But only due to this ''mistake'' we are able to have this discussion here...

Of course.

 

[Swamp Thing]

I've struggled to understand quantum mechanics for many years. I've recently written some notes on the subject that address some of the issues that I've found confusing and that I think might be helpful to others.

The moderators on Physics Forums, quite reasonably, won't allow me to publicise it here as it's not available from a quality, established source.

The basic issues I've tried to cover are.

1. To make the postulates more plausible than is generally done in most introductory textbooks.
2. To explain why complex numbers are necessary.
3. To try to distinguish between the aspects that are distinctively based on physics and the elements that are an inevitable consequence of the mathematical formalism.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good place to make the notes available to others?

It's been a few months since your original post... I'm wondering what your final decision was.

If haven't settled on a solution yet, here's a suggestion: You could submit it as a tutorial on PF's Insights blog, maybe working with a mentor to ensure that it is accurate. Based on the article, you could then go ahead and make a video on YouTube and submit that on PF's media section.

If your content is accurate and truly helpful to beginners, these two steps should take you a long way towards reaching a lot of your target audience.

 

[phyzguy]

2. To explain why complex numbers are necessary.

Since it is possible to re-state conventional quantum mechanics in the geometric algebra formalism without using complex numbers, as outlined by Doran, et.al., I think your conclusion that complex numbers are necessary is incorrect.

 

[meopemuk]

Hi Peter,

One option you may consider: create an account at https://www.researchgate.net/ and post your writings there.

Eugene.

 

[Tendex]

Since it is possible to re-state conventional quantum mechanics in the geometric algebra formalism without using complex numbers, as outlined by Doran, et.al., I think your conclusion that complex numbers are necessary is incorrect.

How do they re-state the Born rule with reals? I believe that paper just formalizes aspects of the Dirac theory in terms of geometric algebra rather than the whole "conventional QM".