What are /r/QuantumPhysics' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Undergrad-level book: David J. Griffths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Grad-level book: J. J. Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics

I recommend the book “Life on the Edge” by McFadden. It discusses the current state of the field of quantum biology. Life on the Edge

I think audio books are going to be crazy confusing. I recommend an actual book - How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel

https://www.amazon.com/How-Teach-Quantum-Physics-Your/dp/1416572295

I would also watch YouTube videos because there are some great ones on this topic.

If you have very little to no background I suggest “absolutely small” - https://www.amazon.com.au/Absolutely-Small-Quantum-Explains-Everyday-ebook/dp/B0042JSNTU -

For what it’s worth nuclear physics and chemistry can be considered as almost entirely separately. You can understand a lot of chemistry by applying QM to just electrons.

I've been working through McIntyre's book and it's really good for dummies like me who need things explained in a step-by-step way rather than just seeing what "obviously follows."

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Paradigms-David-McIntyre/dp/0321765796

Yeah I find this comes up for me a lot. I don't have a science background, dropped physics in highschool, can't do math without a spreadsheet to save my damn life.

That being said, a couple of these authors here were a huge jumping off point for me to become excited and energized at the concept; they may not go into the nuts and bolts of things but in terms of illuminating concepts and translating nearly undefinable ideas to a brain like mine it's essential.

I don't know, I think people like to pass judgement, but I find with QM there's as much art to the explanations as science, at least when you're starting to learn; you can hear the same explanation ten times, and then the right author comes along and number 11 is the one that breaks the concept wide open for you.

For what it's worth, that Halpern book I think is pretty well regarded as a historical account, I think the Carroll one is also good. Both little books are meant to be summations.

If you're anything like me and want to go "next level" on this stuff, I started with the Theoretical Minimum by Susskind and Friedman. It seems to hold up to a lot of scrutiny and is a text that appears in first year classes a lot. I'd be lying if I told you I understood it and it didn't kick my ass, but it may be what you're looking for as a next foray.
Finally Rovelli is a damn treasure and his face should be on money. Fight me.

the observer is just a complex Pavlov reflex :-) There is the basic reflex loop of stimulus (S) and response (L). With simple organisms like earthworm, the S-R loops are primitive, and with higher animals ending with humans, the S-R loops got more complex. We perceive stimuli from the outer world, and in the ganglion called brain we manipulate the mental represenations of those stimuli, and produce outputs. We have built instruments as extensions of our sensory inputs and of our outputs, hence we can observe with a telescope or a microscope, and manipulate objects using laser pincers, but it still the same basil S-R loop that an earthworm has, and the whole quantum theory is just a mental representation of the outside world existing in the complex ganglion called the brain. If you want to know more about cognition, then read something like Maturana

https://www.amazon.com/Tree-Knowledge-Biological-Roots-Understanding/dp/0877736421

I doubt there are any answers found in quantum mechanics. There is a lot of rubbish quantum mysticism around. Someone somewhere used the word "observe" instead of "shine light at" and a terrible mess of confusion followed

Just quickly gonna address the GR/QT part

I think you have it all backwards. GR isn't a quantum theory. no one is trying to describe quantum mechanics by using GR. The other way around. The problem is that you can't write down a QFT of gravity that works at all energies. You can calculate quantum corrections to GR.

See this

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Quantum_gravity_as_a_low_energy_effective_field_theory

What you describe

>Well I’m not an expert on GR but from what I’ve read it can’t be used to describe Quantum effects. Mainly because in GR events are deterministic and continuous whereas particle interactions are probabilistic

is not at all a correct description of the issues with it though.

As for the rest, I'm warning you hereby to not keep repeating and doubling down on falsehoods already pointed out to you as such.

removed, read rules and the faq. post physics here please, not uninformed pet theories / pseudoscientific rambling.

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantumPhysics/wiki/index

and for an intro to the problem of quantum gravity

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Quantum_gravity_as_a_low_energy_effective_field_theory

I think the whole space is filled by the different quantum fields simultanously, ie there is the electromagnetic field and the electron fields, which have some values at each point of space-time (there is of course uncertainty, because even the fields have to obey the Heisenberg uncertainty relations). Each of these fields is controlled by a particular partial differential equation, so the electron/positron quantum field is controlled by the Dirac equation, and other fields are controlled by the Klein-Gordon equation. The quantum field theory of these free fields is realatively simple. The complicated stuff happens when these quantum fields interact, ie. when the electromagnetic fields starts interaction with the electron/positron field. This gives rise to the famous Feynman diagrams. I once even understood how to derive the Feynman diagrams using the Dyson series. If you want to learn more about it, then learn from the master himself

https://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691024170

I would recommend studying maths over physics. Maths is the language of physics and without it, you will not understand physics. So I would buy some high school maths textbook and start solving maths problems (you will also learn this way, if you actually enjoy it or not, because much of physics school is solving problems)

also, I would buy the HWR physics textbook https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Physics-David-Halliday/dp/0471216437 my university used it during the first semester for classical mechanics. But it is really a great book for self-study and gives you a good foundation for a first year university physics

No, he's not entirely wrong: sometimes beta decay occurs as the result of neutrinos hitting neutrons. But there's a 50% chance that neutrinos will fly through a lightyear of lead without interacting, so it's completely infeasible.

There are possibly other means of stimulating beta decay, however. This paper analyzes the possibility of stimulating beta decay with strong lasers.

OK, you're wanting something much more mathematically rigorous, with stuff like group theory and functional analysis.

I think this might be what you're looking for.

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Mathematicians-Graduate-Mathematics/dp/0821846302

>Quantum mechanics, as it's usually written down in textbooks, is logically incomplete.

It's complete if you accept MWI, and it is also complete if you accept Von Neumann / Stapp.

> The word "observer" is never defined properly in a way that makes it compatible with the Schrödinger equation. So, there's no way to settle this debate, until either something comes along to replace quantum mechanics, or an interpretation is proven to be correct.

I believe there is another alternative, and that's a paradigm shift on a higher level of abstraction. This one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755. The reason for the current impasse is that most of the people involved in the debates do not accept that materialism has been falsified. Once you do accept this, then the whole landscape shifts.

> Can you provide a citation for that? I never saw anything of the sort in his book on quantum mechanics, and I'm not the only one who got that impression. This claim is something I see repeated without proof.

That is partly what Henry Stapp's book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindful-Universe-Mechanics-Participating-Collection/dp/3642180752) is about. He argues that Von Neumann has been misinterpreted by many other people, at that his position was always that the collapse comes from outside the physical system.

> Here, we strive for something of a continuation of the 'academic' environment, meaning, thinking within the framework of the standard models and just generally speaking the shared language of the physicists, that is, physics. That's what the rules 'mean'. It may not be everyone's thing.

I presume you believe Henry Stapp is an academic?

There is plenty of "quantum nonsense" that needs to be rejected. The problem is that far too many people consider people like Henry Stapp and Thomas Nagel to be on the wrong side of the line, when actually they are both very highly respected thinkers who are trying to provoke a Kuhnian paradigm shift in physics. If what's happening here is resistance to a legitimate paradigm shift, rather than the rejection of anti-intellectual nonsense, then that's a big problem, because you're on the wrong side of history.

Susskind’s book (Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465062903/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_n5f9FbT9VTEFY ) and the corresponding free lectures which cover the same material (https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/quantum-mechanics/2012/winter).

I also took a course on the subject which used Griffith’s text, but I feel I got more out of The Theoretical Minimum, honestly.