Laundau LifshitzHamiltonian said:
Sakurai, Ballentine, Weinberg, Messiah, Landau and Lifschitz vol. 3, Dirac. There are many good into books.Hamiltonian said:
No list can be complete without Cohen-Tanoudji's books...vanhees71 said:
But some of those say that there is collapse.vanhees71 said:
I've just noticed that this effect is also discussed in the Zwiebach's book, another topic that can rarely be found in other general QM textbooks.vanhees71 said:
Sure, if you look for books, where they don't mention collapse, the list will be very short ;-).Demystifier said:But some of those say that there is collapse.
These are interesting criteria. What is the set of books satisfies these four criteria, and also is suitable for a first undergrad quantum mechanics course (beyond Modern Physics) at a typical North American university? It wouldn't surprise if it's the empty set.vanhees71 said:
Well, Sakurai is pretty close. My favorite intro textbook is unfortunately not available in English: E. Fick, Einführung in die Grundlagen der Quantentheorie, Aula-Verlag Wiesbaden (1979)George Jones said:These are interesting criteria. What is the set of books satisfies these four criteria, and also is suitable for a first undergrad quantum mechanics course (beyond Modern Physics) at a typical North American university? It wouldn't surprise if it's the empty set.
Someone give Vanhees a large annual salary, so that he can translate German math/physics books!vanhees71 said:
vanhees71 said:
vanhees71 said:
This version of the axioms is given in the I Essentials part of the book. A more sophisticated version of the axioms (for isolated systems) is given in section 16.6, which is in the II Theory part of the book. Here, Zwiebach clearly states "A1. States of the System The complete description of a quantum system is given by a ray in a Hilbert space H." (Zwiebach's bold)Demystifier said:
BWV said:
Yes, found the first part easy to follow, then he lost meandresB said:
In (1), the indices do not match. In (2), the horizontal line of the square root is too short. And I don't see how is 2+3=5 clear, it took several hundred pages to prove 1+1=2 by Whitehead and my avatar.BWV said:
Maybe you'll also likeGeorge Jones said:
This is actually how I experience quite some of these math books too, and mostly read mathbooks/notes written by physicists like Tong or Zee nowadays (God knows I tried!). I guess I value intuition more than rigor.BWV said:
This seems like a fun book, I will probably be getting it. Thanks for mentioning it!haushofer said:Maybe you'll also like
Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science,
https://www.amazon.nl/dp/0198704992/
then (written by a mathematician)
Thank you for the suggestion, now I'm reading it too.George Jones said:
Like 'Misrepresentation Theory'?haushofer said:
JDH is a major poster in Math Logic in Math Stack Exchange, maybe in Overflow too. He's one of those monsters with like 500k score, so that maybe you can gleam some of his material from there. I met him once. Cool guy, but seems to have a wolfman thing going. Careful with him after sundown, as the J, H stand for Jekyll and Hyde ;) Joking on the wolfman look. He was very nice0. I read, understood and explained to someone his take on how Compactness in Logic compares to Compactness in Topology like 3 times, and then forgot most of it.Demystifier said:
Did someone wrote "Unreasonable effectiveness of philosophy in physical and mathematical sciences?". If not, I think I could do it.haushofer said:
Are there any examples of such effectivness?!Demystifier said:Did someone wrote "Unreasonable effectiveness of philosophy in physical and mathematical sciences?". If not, I think I could do it.
I think someone more appropriately wrote something about the "unreasonable UNeffectiveness of philosophy in the natural sciences". I'd even skip the word "unreasonable" here...Demystifier said:Did someone wrote "Unreasonable effectiveness of philosophy in physical and mathematical sciences?". If not, I think I could do it.
Einstein, Schrodinger, Bell, ... For example, Bell discovered his Bell inequalities by starting from quantum philosophy.martinbn said:
This is very different. The effectiveness of mathematics in physics is not just three people who, a hundered years ago, did something that is arguably mathematical and was usfull in physics. While the "effectiveness" of philoosophy in maths seems to be confined to logic, set theory and the foundations of maths. Things most mathematicians are not even aware of.Demystifier said:
For me Einstein is rather an example for the ineffectiveness (even danger) of philosophy in the natural sciences. There's no doubt that in his younger years Einstein was one of the most creative physicist with an amazing imagination about how nature works, and he was in this time always "close to experiment", i.e., he had the observed phenomena in mind when developing theories, which is an creative act rather than some machinery of rational derivation. In his later years, he fell however in the trap of a philosophical prejudice against the implications of quantum theory, particularly the "inseparability" which was his real trouble wrt. the infamous EPR paper, as he clarified some years later in 1948. That's why he was looking for almost 30 years for a unified classical field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism, ignoring the newer experimental facts, according to which there must be more "forces" (or rather "fundamental interactions") than just electromagnetic and gravitational interactions as well as the fact that the quantum-theoretical predictions all were confirmed.Demystifier said:
I disagree. The hole argument was Einstein's disability to view the metric as a gauge field. That's at least partially mathematical. Mach's principle was an important inspiration for Einstein to regard gravity geometrically, although later on he realized GR is not fully Machian. Finally, his emphasis on the equivalence principle and that it was a mere curiosity in Newtonian gravity can be considered philosophical (although its demarcation with physics remains blurry from my point of view.)martinbn said:
martinbn said:
This shows that it is at the very least not so clear cut whether it is philosophy, nor whether it is useful. But if the Mach principle and the hole argument are so useful and effective, why are they not in every GR book?haushofer said:
Exactly, but all physicists are aware (more than aware) of a lot of mathematics.Demystifier said:
I think the same can be said about physics, most physicists are not aware of Bell inequalities and stuff like that.
Because philosophy is useful in the process of construction of new theories, not in their final formulations.martinbn said:
Then shouldn't your book be titled "The unreasonable effectiveness of philosophy in construction of physical theories."?Demystifier said:
Interestingly enough this "hole argument" seems to have survived the philosophical debate although it's solved since 1915. As with all philosophical debates, this apparent "problem" stays unsolved for so long, because it lacks clear mathematical and/or scientific definition. Just yesterday, there was another paper about it on the arXiv. It's amazing, how much thought can be used to solve solved problems ;-)):haushofer said:
Yes, it should. But not the book, just a short essay.martinbn said:
Oh, yes. I see the hole argument as historically curious. I tried to read the papers by Norton, Stachel, Weatherall, Landsman and others about this thing called "spacetime substantivalism", but I don't see why people are so excited about it.vanhees71 said:
Because a lot of books tend to neglect such historical or conceptual stuff, because...a lot of other books do too? I don't know the precise sociological reason.martinbn said:
