Quantum Mechanics, Concise Book
5 comments
·September 5, 2025non_aligned
This is fantastic, although the statement about the intended audience cracked me up a bit: "intended for a general audience including ... anyone interested in a concise intro/overview of QM. Prerequisites: linear algebra, calculus, ..."
The PDF is essentially higher math with QM-related narrative interspersed here and there. Even if you're a STEM graduate, I found that these skills atrophy pretty quickly if you're not using them day-to-day in your work. Scientists often vastly overestimate how conversant their readers are with "obvious" prerequisites such as vector calculus.
And you can often tell on HN, because you have a thread where two mathematicians chat with each other, and then everyone else is just relating anecdotes about quantum mechanics.
horn1ot
It's like when the doctor says "this won't hurt at all". It WILL hurt your brain, QM is not easy.
I'm looking for a QM book structured similar to Norvig LISP books, ie following a demonstrative didactic method, by building computational implementations of toy models demonstrating various aspects of QM (not just QC), toy models of resonator, particle in a box, etc
ziofill
I’ve been writing something like that for a bit, not ready yet but there’s hope! ^^
hodgehog11
Nice, I like how you start out with the finite dimensional case here. Personally though, I don't think I really "got" quantum mechanics until I saw Bell's inequality, so I prefer to put that front and center.
Maybe a pointless nitpick, but is a PDF on GitHub really the best way to distribute this though? I guess you also didn't want to give away the .tex file? arXiv is usually the best place to upload these kinds of notes so they can be indexed and easily found.
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.