Re: Good starting quantum mechanics book?

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Posted by ronron on July 10, 2002 at 07:59:06:

In Reply to: Good starting quantum mechanics book? posted by LakeMountD on July 09, 2002 at 22:53:20:

A great place to start is in the Feynman Lectures, one of
the recommendations in the previous post. It starts with
motivation by discussing the properties of light and the
double slit experiment, then moves into the mathematics.

One of the benefits of the Feynman Lectures is that it
introduces the reader early on to the Dirac bra-ket
representation of QM rather than working strictly with
the wave function and diff eqns. This introduction will
be most useful to you later when you move to more
complicated books.

Another great book (but more advanced) is the two-volume
text by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. This is the best book
I've ever seen on non-relativistic QM. The first volume,
for example, is divided into three main sections: the
first one discusses motivation, the second section
deals with mathematical methods in QM (what is L^2 space,
how self-adjoint operators work, etc), the third section
discusses the ideas in section one but with the mathematics
of section 2 added.

A decent first book is the Liboff book, but this book
does not use the Dirac notation a lot. It was written
by an electrical engineer and you can tell. Nothing
wrong with it, but I prefer CCT.

There's another very old book if you can find it. It's
called "Quantum Chemistry" by Ira R. Levine. Don't let the
"chemistry" in the title bother you. It's mathematically
advanced for an intro book, and the first 8 chapters or
so deal with physics.

You might want to take a look at the book by Leslie
Ballentine. It's got a nice discussion of Bell's Theorem
at the end. Probably not the best book to use as a
first introduction.

I'd say read the Feynman Lectures first. The QM part is
in volume III. His exposition is excellent, and this
provides motivation for the mathematics. He gets you to
understand the physics instead of just springing an
equation on you.