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Agreed. His "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" is also great.

In case you really want to try something --

If you want to learn QM, you should pick up Griffith's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" and work through it. It's a readable undergraduate level treatment that hits all the important stuff.

Depends how much maths you already know. I've liked Griffiths' Introduction to Quantum Mechanics- the first chapter goes into the Schrodinger equation.

Is there something similar for Quantum Mechanics? Both MIT and Harvard use Griffith's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics," but it seems to emphasize computation and symbol manipulation over physical intuition.

Introduction of Quantum Mechanics and Introduction to Electrodynamics, both by David J. Griffiths. He also wrote Introduction to Elementary Particles, but I have not read that one.

Both books masterfully take exceptionally complex fields and break them down into easily digested chunks, with a clear progression of ideas as you go through the book. Do note that these are "Introduction" books written for Junior/Senior Physics majors.

I'm not sure what's college level physics like, but for me (math/CS background) learning quantum physics was:

- Quantum algorithms and computing: "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson [0] and "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Nielsen and Chuang [1]. "Quantum Computer Science" by Mermin is really good too.

- Leonard Susskind's lectures on quantum mechanics [3]

- "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths [4] -- just your regular QM textbook. Recommended by many and I found the explanations clear and easy to follow

- also there are some recommendations by John Baez [5], that I've personally not checked out, but when Baez recommends something, it's good!

Note that I'm not a physicist and doing it only for fun, so would be interesting to hear from people with proper physics education!

[0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantu...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quantum-computer-scienc...

[3] https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/quantum-mechanics/201...

[4] https://physicspages.com/Griffiths%20QM.html

[5] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html#quantum_mechanics

I'd recommend Griffiths "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics". The writing style is informal enough that it's comfortable to read, but still had enough mathematical rigor to teach the material. It's certainly not a definitive reference, but I only reach for my other books after I've determined that it's not in Griffiths.

> ...pilot wave theory--which is taught in every introductory QM course and covered in every introductory QM text...

Having assisted in teaching intro QM courses, I can say this is very incorrect -- unless you replace "every" with "many" and "taught/covered" with "mentioned off hand".

I just pulled the very popular "introduction to quantum mechanics" by Griffiths off my shelf. It contains nothing about pilot waves except for a single footnote in an appendix used as an example of "a number of hidden variable theories [proposed over the years]".

> Entanglement is not a property about wave functions and really has nothing to do with waves. It's a logical consequence of the uncertainty principle...

I don't follow, and I can't find anything online that makes this claim. Could you explain more?

Maybe we disagree about the definition of entanglement. I'll take one from Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. On page 422, Griffith writes [1]:

> An entangled state [is] a two-particle state that cannot be expressed as the product of two one-particle states....

(There is no mention of uncertainty in this section either.) Here I read "state" to mean "wave function" which implies that entanglement is a statement about a wave function, as I earlier claimed. "Cannot be expressed as a product" means not independent, just like the balls in my analogy (or electrons from neutral pion decay).

When I say "see the color of one ball," I am collapsing the wave function of the balls by making an observation (in the Copenhagen interpretation). This is analogous to measuring an electron's spin. If you replace "ball" with "electron," "bag" with "decay of a neutral pion", "red/blue" with "spin up/down," and "see the color of one ball" with "measure the spin of one electron," that's a completely valid statement in QM.

[1] https://notendur.hi.is/mbh6/html/_downloads/introqm.pdf

Without maths, I don't think there is. QM starts with the Schrödinger equation -- which allows you to find a wave function -- followed by Born's Rule, which is a statistical interpretation of the wave function. There are questions of interpretation even at this point. Schrödinger himself was skeptical of his own equation[0]!

The classic intro text is Griffiths', Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. But it's a mathematical treatment -- as it has to be -- although it might be readable by accepting the key equations as axioms and reading the text. A smart, determined person would get something out of that, but I don't know how much. After all, QM is notoriously difficult to understand even by the super-smart, mathematically adept folk.

I'm not sure that a pop-sci book could convey sufficient detail to allow someone to follow many QM debates, even the philosophical debates; there is just too much background required -- which I am not claiming I possess; still learning.

Personally, I think QM is in the process of building an ever increasing body of information. The distillation of knowledge is yet to come. It's a hell of a trip, though.

[0] Bloch, Physics Today, December 1976

> How long would I have to study physics to be able to understand everything in this sentence?

Just start reading David J. Griffiths: Introduction to Electrodynamics. A very well written textbook. The problem might be, if you don't know vector calculus, you might not be able to read this book, so you need to learn some vector calculus, too.

Then start reading Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths, too. Best introductory QM book that I know of. If you managed to read Electrodynamics, you should by now know enough calculus for this book, too. But you also need to know about complex numbers here.

The "inviscid compressible fluid" is about fluid mechanics. I don't know any splendid textbook on that.

Quantum Mechanics and the three generations of matter are slightly different. Quantum Mechanics is like Newton's laws at small scales, in that if you know what things are like at time t, and you know all the potentials (forces), it tells you how they evolve. It also tells you what states are physically allowed (e.g. only certain energies for electrons orbiting an atom). You can study QM for years without any real look at the standard model, which is where the three generations come from.

If you want an undergraduate class in QM, edX has MIT's classes on line:

https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:MITx+8.04.1x+3T201...

If you want a textbook, Griffth's "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" is the standard answer. It's very much a "shut up and calculate" book, you'll learn how to compute expected values of commutators without much intuition for what they mean.

Update: Others point out Griffth's "Introduction to Elementary Particles", read their recommendations, sounds like the way to go.

If don't want to spend 12 hours a week for 3 months and still not have learned much about the 3 generations, then ... I don't know, maybe QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter? I don't know if it has the 3 generations, but it only assumes high school math, yet gets into the quantum version of electricity and magnetism.

Beware that in professional physics Rogers Penrose's view on QM and consciousness are not considered mainstream (to put it mildly). I had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained).

At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser (http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/) -
a general reading on the beginnings of quantum information (also, why quantum metaphysics is tempting but does not work); bear in mind it overvalues hippies - this field has also different, Soviet roots - vide Holevo’s theorem.

Or even better - start actually interacting with some quantum mechanics, rather than considering it mystical or esoteric. As Griffiths put it in his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (Chapter 4.4.1, https://archive.org/details/IntroductionToQuantumMechanics_7...):

"To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form “this particle doesn’t have a well-defined position” [...] sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these."

...an of course, play http://quantumgame.io/ :) (a recent submit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14432176)

Learning a bit of Quantum Mechanics is going to be more helpful than anything else in physics to understand quantum computing.

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths is a standard undergrad text. The math is all "simple" (linear algebra and calculus). It's the learning a new way to think about the world that's the hard part.

In the particular context of this post, it isn't. The local hidden variable theory is conclusively wrong. Not sure if there are recent results about nonlocal hidden variables, but last time I checked we couldn't say anything about that.

There's a great (and pedagogical enough) discussion of this at the back of Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

This question is addressed directly by Griffiths in his “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics”. It’s in a footnote at the beginning of chapter 3, “Formalisms”.

Basically he says that when physicists say “Hilbert space”, they’re actually referring to a specific Hilbert space, namely the set of all square integrable functions, sometimes referred to as “L2”.