Introduction to Quantum Mechanics - Hardcover

Robert H. Dicke And J. P. Wittke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201015102 ISBN 13: 9780201015102

Publisher: Addison Wesley, 1960

Synopsis

This text is designed primarily for an introductory course in quantum mechanics at the first-year graduate level, but the first portion is also suitable for a senior-level course. This text can be divided into three sections. In the first section, the first three chapters, we point out the inadequacy of classical concepts to explain many atomic-scale phenomena and suggest how the basic concepts of classical mechanics must be altered to explain experimental observations. The reasonableness of a wavemechanical theory of particle behavior is shown, and it is seen how classi- cally anomalous behavior, such as quantization of energy and angular momentum and the "tunneling through" a potential barrier by a particle, can result from a formalism which inherently gives both a wave and a particle aspect to the entity that classically would be considered as a particle. The second section of the book, Chapters 4 through 10, starts with two chapters which lay the groundwork for the more formal, postulational approach to quantum mechanics which follows. We then place Schrodinger wave mechanics on a more defined and rigorous basis, and we use it to discuss such basic aspects of mechanics as measurement, angular momentum, and the behavior of a particle in a spherically symmetric force field. These first two sections, in which the emphasis is on a grasp of the fundamental principles and their mathematical formulation, with a minimum of the involved mathematical manipulations that so often obscure the physics of the matter, therefore form an introduction to the subject on a level that a well-prepared undergraduate can handle.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison Wesley
• Publication date: 1960
• ISBN 10: 0201015102
• ISBN 13: 9780201015102
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 369