Name: Lectures on quantum mechanics
ISBN: 9781107028722

Lectures on quantum mechanics

"Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg combines his exceptional physical insight with his gift for clear exposition to provide a concise introduction to modern quantum mechanics. Ideally suited to a one-year graduate course, this textbook is also a useful reference for researchers. Readers are introduced to the subject through a review of the history of quantum mechanics and an account of classic solutions of the Schrödinger equation, before quantum mechanics is developed in a modern Hilbert space approach. The textbook covers many topics not often found in other books on the subject, including alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, Bloch waves and band structure, the Wigner-Eckart theorem, magic numbers, isospin symmetry, the Dirac theory of constrained canonical systems, general scattering theory, the optical theorem, the 'in-in' formalism, the Berry phase, Landau levels, entanglement and quantum computing. Problems are included at the ends of chapters, with solutions available for instructors at www.cambridge.org/9781107028722"-- "Ideally suited to a one-year graduate course, this textbook is also a useful reference for researchers. Readers are introduced to the subject through a review of the history of quantum mechanics and an account of classic solutions of the Schr.

What Hacker News says

griffzhowlSep 2025

Weinberg's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics has an illuminating historical introduction for its first chapter. The introduction to his Quantum Theory of Fields is more specifically about quantum field theory, fittingly, and focuses on later developments.

If you want something that's more focused throughout on the historical progression, a classic book is Jammer's Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, but it assumes you're already familiar with quantum and statistical mechanics.

If you like videos, the physicist Jorge Diaz has excellent videos accessibly detailing the experimental and theoretical history https://www.youtube.com/@jkzero/playlists

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effieJul 2021

Personal observation.

Steven Weinberg made his career as an accomplished disciple of orthodox quantum theoretical physics, making it to the top of the physics/social food chain via hard work developing quantum field theory and getting acknowledged as one of the fathers of Standard Model. But all this without really "rocking the boat" of quantum theory. For a long time he believed quantum theory is fine and was not interested in the deeper questions about it.

He eventually came around and realized and acknowledged that quantum theory has serious systemic problems of arbitrariness/internal consistency related to dichotomy unitary evolution/measurement, to dismay of some self-assured fanboys of QT orthodoxy. This gets him to the Feynman/Schwinger level, as in "did lots of great work, inspired lots of people, and realized the standard narratives have serious problems and wasn't afraid to say it and go his own way".

His last textbook Lectures on Quantum Mechanics is one of the few extraordinarily notable textbooks on quantum theory that came out in last decades. If you want to get deeper into QT after you get through the standard superficial and hand-wavy college course, this is a very good and concise book.

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evanbJul 2017

I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

CULTURAL

Einstein - Essays in Humanism

Frayn - Copenhagen

Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

Macaulay - The Way Things Work

Paulos - Innumeracy

Sagan - Cosmos

Sagan - Broca's Brain

Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

Salam - Science in the Third World

Seife - Zero

Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

POPULAR

Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

Feynman - The Meaning of It All

Feynman - Lectures on Physics

Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

Polya - How to Solve It

Schrödinger - What is Life?

Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

Wallace - Everything And More

Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

TEXTS

Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

Abelson and Sussman - SICP

Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

Fermi - Thermodynamics

Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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kgwgkFeb 2018

I am not an expert and I am not sure to what extent a solution to the measurement problem is possible, or even needed, but I think it would mean that the current QM theory is incorrect or at least incomplete. In the first case (v.g. the "objective collapse" theories) the Schroedinger function may be very good approximation and it may be practically impossible to get a experimental/observational verification. In the second case (v.g. the "non-local hidden variables" theories) the predictions of the Schroedinger function may be exact so a verification could be impossible even in principle.

Weinberg, one of the greatest theoretical physicists alive, wrote last year a piece explaining why he's not satisfied with any interpretation of QM. He distinguishes two main approaches: "realist" and "instrumentalist". Here is the article and some comments: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quan... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/06/steven-weinberg-p...

He gives more details in section 3.7 of his "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics" (Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics) which ends as follows:

"My own conclusion is that today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. This view is not universally shared. Indeed, many physicists are satisfied with their own interpretation of quantum mechanics. But different physicists are satisfied with different interpretations. In my view, we ought to take seriously the possibility of finding some more satisfactory other theory, to which quantum mechanics is only a good approximation."

The last chapter in Commins' "Quantum Mechanics: An Experimentalist’s Approach" (The Quantum Measurement Problem) gives a nice description of the problem and the proposed solutions which fall into three categories:

1.- there is no problem. [Decoherence doesn't completely avoid the problem; it makes the off-diagonal elements of the density matrix zero but the issue of going from a mixture to a specific outcome remains.]

2.- the interpretation of the rules must be changed but this can be done in ways that are empirically indistinguishable from the standard theory. [De Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave theory postulates "real" particles compatible with QM predictions, but currently only works well in the nonrelativistic setting.]

3.- deterministic unitary evolution is only an approximation. [Adding non-linear and stochastic terms produce "spontaneus localization", tuning the parameters we can explain both the microscopic "unitary" and the macroscopic "non-unitary" behaviours.]

"In conclusion, although many interesting suggestions have been made for overcoming the quantum measurement problem, it remains unsolved. We can only hope that some future experimental observation may guide us toward a solution."

[By the way, I sent you an email but I don't know if you got it.]

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