Quantum Mechanics Made Easy?

I was recently asked to recommend a good popular-level book on quantum mechanics. I don’t think I know of any, at least not first hand. We had a whole thread on the Greatest Popular Science Book, filled with good suggestions, but none specifically about quantum mechanics. A quick glance through amazon.com reveals plenty of books on particle physics, or even specific notions like quantum computing, but not one book that I could recommend in good conscience to someone who just wants to know what quantum mechanics is all about. It is the greatest intellectual achievement of the twentieth century, after all.

There are some books that either come close, or might very well be perfect but I’m not familiar with them. In the latter category we have The Quantum World by Ken Ford, and David Lindley’s Where Does the Weirdness Go? These might be great, I just haven’t read them. I’m sure that the Mr. Tompkins books by George Gamow are good, since I love One, Two, Three… Infinity (and Gamow was a genius), but I haven’t actually read them. Feynman’s QED is another classic, but focuses more on quantum electrodynamics (duh) than on QM more generally. David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality is a fantastic book, especially if you are curious about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics; but I’m not sure if it’s the best first introduction (I haven’t looked at it closely in years). And David Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience is great for a careful philosophical account of what QM is all about, but again maybe not the best first exposure.

Any suggestions? Not for a good book that is related to quantum mechanics or perhaps mentions it in a chapter or two, but for something whose major goal is to provide a clear account of QM. Surely there is something?

62 Comments

62 thoughts on “Quantum Mechanics Made Easy?”

  1. When Australian consciousness philosopher David Chalmers was teaching a course on the physical basis of consciousness a few years ago he sent out a call to his friends to vote on the most user-friendly first book on quantum theory. My own book “Quantum Reality” was considered too technical for a naive reader. The vote went to “Ghost in the Atom” edited by Paul Davies which is a collection of BBC interviews with quantum-mechanical greats about the foundational questions prefaced by a wonderfully clear summary of QM by Paul Davies himself. I voted for GITA too. Short and snappy–a good book to whet your appetite for stronger stuff. Heinz Pagels’s “Cosmic Code” is also a fine popularization.

  2. In Search of Schrodingers Cat by John Gribbin is an excellent book. It covers everything from the basics up to the many worlds interpretation and the spin paradox. No previous knowledge is assumed (I read it when I was 16) and explains evertyhing clearly.

    It is this book which made me start my undergraduate degree!

  3. the best introduction to Quantum Mechanics for laypersons I have ever read unfortunately exists only in Dutch:
    Lijnse, PL : Kwantummechanica, Het Spectrum – Antwerpen, 1981
    This book contains the best description of the (in)famous 2 slit expiment I’ve ever seen, and moreover, the author doesn’t shy away from simple mathematics, such as (single variable) calculus. The book is actually aimed at last year secondary school / high school students.

    But if you want something in English:
    J.P. McEvoy, Oscar Zarate, Introducing Quantum Theory,
    Icon Books, 1999
    Extremely funny (including Schrodinger’s sexual escapades) and surprisingly good.

    just my 2 eurocents

  4. Feynman’s Character of Physical Law and his QED books introduce the double slit experiment, which is at the heart of the weirdness, without hyping the assumed interpretations. Feynman also has a passage in the former book saying that path-integrals become infinitely complex on the smallest of distance scales (he was clearly thinking about the ultraviolet cutoff in quantum field theory), so he concludes that part of the “weirdness” problem in quantum mechanics and field theory may be artefacts of the complex mathematical modelling, and the underlying physics is probably simple if you can ever discover the deep simplicity, “like the chequer board with all of its apparent complexities”.

    In the QED book, Feynman mentions that the reason for the wavy orbital (Schroedinger probability distribution) when electrons are confined on the atomic scale is simply that the space is so small that interference occurs with particle loops created in the ground state of the quantum vacuum, and the same accounts for the double slit experiment.

    Most popular books focus on speculative interpretations (if they are bad hype books) or focus on mathematics alone.

    It depends what you want to learn about quantum mechanics. If you want to know the deep meaning, steer away from religious hype and read Feynman, and study quantum field theory because that underlies QM and is still incomplete. If you want to use quantum mechanics, there are many good books with titles like Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. A beautifully clear and accurate explanation without mathematical details (he uses graphs of propability distributions to explain the Schroedinger equation) of how the periodic table of elements follows from the four quantum numbers (and where those numbers come from) is given by Professor Samuel Glasstone’s 1972 book “Inner Space: the Structure of the Atom”.

  5. For me also the first to spring to mind was the Dutch book by Piet Lijnse, but it has been out of print for many years now. I read it in my last year as a high-school student and was blown away. I suspect Lijnse is emeritus professor now (he is/was professor of physics education at Utrecht University), so perhaps he can be convinced to write an updated (English) version.

  6. – What Is Quantum Mechanics?: A Physics Adventure (Paperback)
    by Transnational College of Lex (Editor)

    But start first with their:

    – Who Is Fourier?: A Mathematical Adventure

    It was written by Japanese students who knew nothing about the subject! So they report what they have learned (under the advise of a senior physics tutor). The books have a very unusual style with Japanese cartoons all over, but THEY ARE GREAT BOOKS. One could start them without even knowing what a trigonometric function or complex number is. They construct all concepts needed and reach a reasonable advanced level. Highly recommended.

    Christine

  7. I really enjoyed Robert Gilmore’s “Alice in Quantumland,” an allegory explaining quantum mechanics a la Lewis Carroll. Very amusing and clever, and quite accessible to a non-scientist…

  8. Fran

    In Search of Schrodingers Cat by John Gribbin is an excellent book. It covers everything from the basics up to the many worlds interpretation and the spin paradox. No previous knowledge is assumed (I read it when I was 16) and explains evertyhing clearly.

    It is this book which made me start my undergraduate degree!

    That could’ve easily been my reply if I had seen this post sooner. 🙂 John Gribbin is one of my favourite pop-sci authors; I own and have read quite a few of his books.

    This particular book was published in the mid 80’s. There is a sequel to it – In Search of Schrodinger’s Kittens, which covers supersymmetry and more esoteric stuff, although I haven’t read that book yet.

    Mr.Tompkins…
    is a fun to read, though it may not be as “rigourous” pop-sci book. 😀

  9. Sean
    Not for a good book that is related to quantum mechanics or perhaps mentions it in a chapter or two, but for something whose major goal is to provide a clear account of QM.

    Gribbin’s introduction to the book starts as follows:

    If all the books and articles written for the layman on relativity theory were laid end to end, they’d probably reach from here to the moon. …But if all the books and articles written for the layman on quantum theory were laid end to end, they’d just about cover my desk.

    You can also find an extensive bibliography on nothing but quantum theory/mechanics mostly at a non-technical level and the end of the book.

  10. Navneeth

    Fran

    In Search of Schrodingers Cat by John Gribbin is an excellent book. It covers everything from the basics up to the many worlds interpretation and the spin paradox. No previous knowledge is assumed (I read it when I was 16) and explains evertyhing clearly.

    It is this book which made me start my undergraduate degree!

    That could’ve easily been my reply if I had seen this post sooner. 🙂 John Gribbin is one of my favourite pop-sci authors; I own and have read quite a few of his books.

    That could’ve easily been my reply if I had seen this post sooner. 🙂 John Gribbin is one of my favourite pop-sci authors; I own and have read quite a few of his books.

  11. Maybe I’m a bit off base, but I recall Sir Nevill Mott wrote an ‘Outline of Wave Mechanics’ (which may be hard to come by these days) intended for high school students. It wasn’t a pop science book though.

  12. JoeK,

    Gribbin changes his tune a bit between “In Search of Schroedinger’s Cat” and “In Search of … Kittens”.

    In the first (80s) book he explains the Copenhagen Interpretation but says he is most taken with the “many world’s” interpretation, and sees the weirdness as definite evidence that “nothing is real” (but then how to you clearly define the word real, so this is just obfuscating).

    In the more recent (90s) “Kittens” book he is keen on Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, but still doesn’t seem to appreciate that quantum field theory is the essence of it all. In a Yang-Mills quantum field theory, a static field is actually an ongoing exchange of gauge bosons between charges.

    Recently (2004) he wrote “Deep Simplicity” which starts off promisingly with an important quotation from Feynman concerning quantum mechanics, but then the rest of the book is just essays about chaos theory, and steers clear of quantum mechanics. (When I emailed him last year with some suggestions, it led to arguments. It seems he is nowadays happy with publishing contracts for writing books on topics already popular, and doesn’t have any enthusiasm for breaking new ground.)

  13. I read Mr Tompkins as a kid and it make a huge impression on me. I think it would be great for a teenage reader.

  14. Nick Herbert, count me among the readers of Quantum Reality (which I still have in hard cover); enjoyed it very much! I seem to recall Owen Gingerich once recommending Zukav’s book–although from the cover it strikes me as a little too ‘hey, wow, quantum weirdness, man!’…

    🙂

  15. Someone who knows some basic Physics concepts (maybe high school physics) would find a substantive and fun introduction in D. F. Styer “The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics”

  16. I think Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos” is the best description of the double-slit experiment and other phenomena that I have come across. He goes through it slowly and clearly.

    I will temper that by saying I have not read many of the other books that have mentioned.

  17. I hate to be pedantic, but nc, QFT does not “underlie” QM in any reasonable
    sense of the word. You don’t derive QM as some approximation to QFT and
    you don’t have to understand QFT to understand QM. QFT is simply QM as applied to relativistic fields.

  18. Hi J,

    You’ve got it back to front! QFT is the general theory valid in all situations, and QM (although it came first by historical accident) is merely an approximation to it, obtained by assuming non-relativistic cases. Schroedinger’s equation is a non-relativistic Dirac equation, and in fact you can in theory apply QFT path integrals to the atom, ie QM.

    If you examine QFT, polarized pair production occurs in the vacuum where the electric field is over about 10^16 volts/metre, which is the field strength within about 10^-15 metre from an electron. The loops of charges randomly being produced within 10^-15 m of an electron cause small scale deflections to the motion of the electron.

    Over a large distances, the random interferences cancel out and so a beta particle in a vacuum appears to go in a straight line, but on the atomic scale the interference spoils its closed elliptical orbital into chaos which is described by Schroedinger’s equation. (Although his hidden variables theory is wrong, Bohm did show in 1952 that an electron suffering effectively from a kind of Brownian motion interference from a chaotic gas of charges reuslts in Schroedinger’s equation. However, be warned that Bohm’s infinite potential theory is wrong.)

  19. nc

    However, be warned that Bohm’s infinite potential theory is wrong

    .
    Why do you insist that Bohm’s theory is wrong ? I always thought physicists didn’t like it only because his theory made things unnecessarily complicated, not because it was wrong per se ?
    Is your remark perhaps in some way related to it being a truly non-local theory ?

  20. “In Search of Schrodingers Cat by John Gribbin is an excellent book. It covers everything from the basics up to the many worlds interpretation and the spin paradox. No previous knowledge is assumed (I read it when I was 16) and explains evertyhing clearly.

    It is this book which made me start my undergraduate degree!”

    Did I post as Fran earlier and not remember?

    I agree, this book blew my mind when I read it. I haven’t read it since I’ve “really” learned QM, so I’m not sure if I can judge it accurately, but it definitely was life-altering.

  21. Hi Johan, Bell set up an inequality to test Bohm’s class of hidden variable theories experimentally. Aspect did it around 1982: photon spin correlation indicated that either the wavefunction collapse doesn’t occur at the time of the measurement, or else that there is quantum entanglement involving instantaneous action at a distance (the photons were metres apart, going in different directions when their polarization was measured and found to rule out Bohm’s theories).

    Either way, this seems to rule out Bohm’s hidden variables which invents unobserved/unobservables (hidden variables) instead of building on established QFT facts (pair production polarization effects are observable in high energy scattering) which do have lots of evidence:

    ‘All charges are surrounded by clouds of virtual photons, which spend part of their existence dissociated into fermion-antifermion pairs. The virtual fermions with charges opposite to the bare charge will be, on average, closer to the bare charge than those virtual particles of like sign. Thus, at large distances, we observe a reduced bare charge due to this screening effect.’ — I. Levine, D. Koltick, et al., Physical Review Letters, v.78, 1997, no.3, p.424.

    ‘… the effect of the polarization of the vacuum … amounts to the creation of a plethora of electron-positron pairs around the location of the charge. These virtual pairs behave as dipoles that, as in a dielectric medium, tend to screen this charge, decreasing its value at long distances (i.e. lower energies).’ – http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040 p 71.

    If you look at equation 8.20 on p 85 of http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0510/0510040.pdf you will see that pair production occurs when the electric field strength exceeds ~10^18 v/m. This occurs at roughly 10^-15 m from a fundamental charge, corresponding to the distance of closest approach in head on collisions of 0.5 MeV electrons, which is the energy taken as the infrared cutoff in equation 7.15 on page 70 of that text. This vacuum polarization effect leads to renormalization of charge. Obviously gravitational charge (mass) can’t be polarized as there is only one type of gravitational charge, so therefore quantum gravity must be non-renormalizable!

    It is a shame that quantum field theory is buried deeply in technical jargon and math, instead of being popularized. There is loads of evidence for it from particle physics.

  22. Quantum field theory really has nothing to do with the difficult interpretational questions of quantum mechanics. It does have a lot to say about what quantum mechanics means in general, however. Yet QFT, despite what it may say e.g. in the introduction to Peskin and Schroder, is a very difficult subject to understand. For one thing, it is most ephatically NOT simply quantum mechanics applied to fields. We build up QFT using the notation of QM, and this works quite well until one goes about calculating loop corrections. Then one must introduce infinite renormalizations. The renormalization of infinities is is a basic component of QFT that exists nowhere in the QM framework.

  23. What about Introducing Quantum Theory from Totem Books’ Introducing… series? (The blog software is choking on my attempt to link to the book’s page.)

    I’ve generally been a fan of Oxford University Press’s A Very Short Introduction series, but the Quantum Theory book isn’t getting good reviews on Amazon. An anthropologist friend of mine discussed the series on his blog.

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