The Physics of Quantum Mechanics

The Physics of Quantum Mechanics aims to give students a good understanding of how quantum mechanics describes the material world.It shows that the theory follows naturally from the use of probability amplitudes to derive probabilities.It stresses that stationary states are unphysical mathematical abstractions that enable us to solve the theory's governing equation, the time-dependent Schroedinger equation.Every opportunity is taken to illustrate the emergence of the familiar classical, dynamical world through the quantum interference of stationary states.The text stresses the continuity between the quantum world and the classical world, which is merely an approximation to the quantum world. The connections between observables, operators and transformations are clearly explained and the standard commutation rules derived from the properties of spacetime.A chapter is devoted to entanglement, quantum computation, density operators and their role in thermodynamics, and the measurement pro