←back to thread

81 points pykello | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
pkoird ◴[] No.45146435[source]
Nice effort. As far as textbooks for QM, Electrodynamics, and any sufficiently complex field of study goes, I always feel that these have been written using abstractions that people have developed much later retroactively. I understand the advantages: it makes the entire content concise, structured, and basically straightforward. However, what I crave is a technical book that is based upon the history of the subject. Something that doesn't start immediately with Hilbert spaces but starts off by talking about why Max Plank did what he did, how did Einstein improve upon it, what mistakes were made, what misguided hypothesis were later corrected in what manner, how were different things then unified... you get the point. I think this narrative based approach would motivate me much better than something that's condensed and distilled.
replies(10): >>45146488 #>>45146592 #>>45146824 #>>45146872 #>>45147923 #>>45147928 #>>45148064 #>>45148364 #>>45151771 #>>45153477 #
1. kgwgk ◴[] No.45151771[source]
This one is not exactly a “textbook” but it is more advanced and technical than most “popular science” books and follows a historical presentation:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-quantum-cookbook...

The Quantum Cookbook

Mathematical Recipes for the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Jim Baggott

1:Planck's Derivation of E = hn: The Quantisation of Energy

2:Einstein's Derivation of E = mc2: The Equivalence of Mass and Energy

3:Bohr's Derivation of the Rydberg Formula: Quantum Numbers and Quantum Jumps

4:De Broglie's Derivation of / = h/p: Wave-particle Duality

5:Schrödinger's Derivation of the Wave Equation: Quantisation as an Eigenvalue Problem

6:Born's Interpretation of the Wavefunction: Quantum Probability

7:Heisenberg, Bohr, Robertson, and the Uncertainty Principle : The Interpretation of Quantum Uncertainty

8:Heisenberg's Derivation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle: The Stability of Matter and the Periodic Table

9:Dirac's Derivation of the Relativistic Wave Equation: Electron Spin and Antimatter

10:Dirac, Von Neumann, and the Derivation of the Quantum Formalism: State Vectors in Hilbert Space

11:Von Neumann and the Problem of Quantum Measurement: The 'Collapse of the Wavefunction'

12:Einstein, Bohm, Bell, and the Derivation of Bell's Inequality: Entanglement and Quantum Non-locality