Descrição

This book explores the fundamental topic of quantum mechanics from a novel perspective, by following its historical development and emphasizing the way the minds of its bright young creators worked, showing how new ideas came through and how conceptual difficulties were overcome, at least sometimes. We try to convey the essence of quantum mechanics to the reader, discussing how it evolved from the initial concept of Planck’s quanta to current developments in quantum entanglement, teleportation, and decoherence cornerstones of the emerging second quantum revolution.

The book is aimed at the interested non-specialist with some background in mathematics and physics, who seeks to understand modern quantum mechanics and its potential applications. It will also be of value as a complement to lecture notes or textbooks on the subject.

The book starts with a description of the Planck-Einstein revolution which introduced the concept of quanta of energy. The birth and development of a theory of quantum mechanics are then described in the second chapter. The third chapter addresses the principle of superposition, at the very core of quantum mechanics, and the fourth chapter outlines the concepts of observables and operators. A discussion of symmetries and symmetry transformations is presented in chapter five. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the subject of the sixth chapter, and the seventh chapter focuses on the notion of entanglement… The book ends in chapter eight with a discussion of the interpretations of quantum mechanics.