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Re:Why do many math books have so much detail and so little ... by jessriedel on Monday May 15, 2017 @09:58AM (#14341595)
As someone who works on the foundations of quantum mechanics (how to formulate, why we think it's right, etc.), I'll disagree with this. The fact that much of the detail from many experiments is available somewhere is not much more useful than being told that code is available from the authors if only you email them and wait 3 months. The barrier to figuring out this stuff are immense.

Furthermore, it's not necessary to communicate the actual, usually circuitous, route taken historically by scientists. Instead, you could just describe the series of hypothetical simplified experiments whose results would lead one to quantum mechanics and rejecting alternatives. This is never attempted in a serious way (trivial uses of the Stern-Gerlach experiment as a model of quantum mechanics not withstanding).

Re:Why do many math books have so much detail and so little ... by wayn3 on Monday May 15, 2017 @11:34AM (#14342365)
Dirac derives quantum physics from first principles, including the relevant thought experiments, in one of his books. that was good enough for me. made a lot of sense.

"Principles of Quantum Mechanics"

Re:Why do many math books have so much detail and so little ... by jessriedel on Monday May 15, 2017 @02:34PM (#14343927)
Dirac's book is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Just think about the fact that this book from 1958, which makes a valiant attempt at justifying a few parts of the formalism (it's on my bookshelf), is basically a high-water mark even though it's very flawed, especially given what we know today. What does it tell us about the ability of physicist to transmit ideas to the next generation with high-fidelity if, to understand why the quantum formalism is how it is, you recommend reading a 60 year old book by a guy who was alive when it was being formulated!

Some of those flaws:

(1) Dirac postulates, as most people do, that measurable observables are to be identified with Hermitian operators. This is a mistake that can be traced back to von Neumann. In reality, the larger class of normal operators are perfectly fine as measurable observables. Indeed, measurements are properly associated with only an orthonormal basis, and it is completely unnecessary to label them with eigenvalues, real or otherwise. (To see this, just observe that there is no physical difference between experiments that measure x and x^3 for the position of a particle.) Dirac's discussion on page 35 is just wrong.

(2) Unless my memory fails me, Dirac gives little to no justification for why we use tensor products to build up the state space of a many-body system from the state space of a single-body system, a tectonic shift from classical mechanics at the heart of the weirdness and power of quantum mechanics.

(3) Dirac was written before Bell's inequality. I mean, just look at the pithy discussion by Dirac (p. 4-7) to justify fundamental indeterminacy, one of the most profound things we know about the universe. Do you think this would have convinced Newton? Or Dirac in 1925? (We know it didn't convince Einstein.) This sort of thought experiment is lovely for an article in Scientific American to give laymen a sense of where things come from, but it's nowhere near the rigor with which we should teach physicists.

Re:Why do many math books have so much detail and so little ... by SomeStupidPoint on Monday May 15, 2017 @12:58PM (#14343115)
I really wish I could find a book (or series) that started with explaining the (non-)results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and traced through the major experiments that underpin modern theory. Just picking out the major quintessential experiment (types) -- things like the Bell test.

Much of science is really just subtle modifications or tests of major theories, but I feel like you could write up... say 12 keystone experiments in 100 page summaries and publish it in 2-3 volumes, (eg, QM and relativity volumes).

The problem I have with only presenting "polished" results is that we lose the context of our modeling -- eg, QM seems to have included non-determinism in an effort to preserve locality, but locality couldn't be preserved in the face of other results, so is non-determinism merely an extra assumption included for legacy reasons (eg, technical debt because no one wants to clean up the model/people forgot why we included it)?

You'd never even think to ask that question if you only saw the cleaned up model of QM divorced from its (philosophical) roots.