Teaching quantum mechanics
Physics Musings points to a Physics Today article about common misconceptions of quantum mechanics students. This is a topic dear to my heart, as I hope someday to teach the subject myself.
I have a lot of ideas about what to include and how to present it, but I’ll save them for another time. My principal complaint is that there’s not enough relation to reality. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally about what happens when you go into a laboratory and start messing with stuff (said the theorist).
Most quantum mechanics books today are watered down versions of Schiff’s classic text. A few have departed from that path, notably Feynman (volume 3 of the Lectures), Schwinger (a fascinating, if idiosyncratic, book), and Sakurai (insert obligatory gripe over the scattering chapter he didn’t write here).
Let us remember the origin of Schiff. It was based on Oppenheimer’s lectures on quantum mechanics, which were given to graduate students who needed the theory in their work. The experimental motivation for the abstract mathematics was obvious: it was why they were bothering in the first place.
The situation has changed. Now this approach is being used for undergraduates with little experimental background, who have not already mastered the classical eigenfunction techniques in electromagnetism or the Hamiltonian formalism that motivated Schrodinger’s wave mechanics
madhadron :: Jul.29.2006 :: physics, teaching :: 2 Comments »
So would you recommend Schiff to undergraduates?
Yes, but with caveats. I found Schiff extremely useful as an undergraduate for figuring out how to actually manipulate the formalism. If a professor were to supplement Schiff with research papers showing the experimental results which motivated assorted applications of the formalism, and also modern papers showing some of the rather amazing stuff AMO and cond-mat experimentalists can do with quantum systems today, I think it might serve well.