- #1
Elwin.Martin
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I own a copy of Griffith's Quantum Mechanics and I like how it is written very much but while skimming through Griffith's Particle book I saw a reference that said "at the level of Park" and I decided to investigate.
I started to read through it and the text is structured the way most books are, half on theory and half on more direct applications. An introductory chapter on failures of classical physics and then an introduction to the wave function etc but I don't why Park's wave function chapter contains some of the material it contains.
In his second chapter, section 2.3, he takes what he calls a simple solution of the Schrödinger equation
ψk(x,t)=A(k)ei(kx-ωkt)
and then he takes and integrates with respect to k?
ψ(x,t)=∫A(k)ei(kx-ωkt)dk
So does k take any non integer values? I would think that integrating over just integers would still make more sense as a sum, right?
He uses this A(k)ei(kx-ωkt) format through the chapter and tends to skip a lot of steps mathematically and I'm concerned about missing something simple.
Is this a merit of the book that I'm missing somehow by being weak or is the book just filled with gaps the reader needs to fill in? His whole development of the wave function just strikes me as odd...
Though he includes a brief explanation in the Appendix he just applies Fourier's theorem and states a piece of information about A(k). Is this meant to be easily followed? It seems a bit odd to go through all this trouble for his A(k)...
He then defines a φ(k) and a J in terms of A(k) and it just gets messier and messier...
When I skipped to Chapter 3 I had no problem reading the material but I really dislike the presentation of Chapter 2.
Anyway I was just wondering if I could get more opinions on the book and maybe an explanation for my problem. It's probably just my weak math skills but I still feel like he skips a bit and makes things unnecessarily complicated...
Thoughts?
Elwin
I started to read through it and the text is structured the way most books are, half on theory and half on more direct applications. An introductory chapter on failures of classical physics and then an introduction to the wave function etc but I don't why Park's wave function chapter contains some of the material it contains.
In his second chapter, section 2.3, he takes what he calls a simple solution of the Schrödinger equation
ψk(x,t)=A(k)ei(kx-ωkt)
and then he takes and integrates with respect to k?
ψ(x,t)=∫A(k)ei(kx-ωkt)dk
So does k take any non integer values? I would think that integrating over just integers would still make more sense as a sum, right?
He uses this A(k)ei(kx-ωkt) format through the chapter and tends to skip a lot of steps mathematically and I'm concerned about missing something simple.
Is this a merit of the book that I'm missing somehow by being weak or is the book just filled with gaps the reader needs to fill in? His whole development of the wave function just strikes me as odd...
Though he includes a brief explanation in the Appendix he just applies Fourier's theorem and states a piece of information about A(k). Is this meant to be easily followed? It seems a bit odd to go through all this trouble for his A(k)...
He then defines a φ(k) and a J in terms of A(k) and it just gets messier and messier...
When I skipped to Chapter 3 I had no problem reading the material but I really dislike the presentation of Chapter 2.
Anyway I was just wondering if I could get more opinions on the book and maybe an explanation for my problem. It's probably just my weak math skills but I still feel like he skips a bit and makes things unnecessarily complicated...
Thoughts?
Elwin