Customer Reviews

The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although I am skeptical about the real significance of decoherence, I recommend this book if you want to learn this topic, because the style is brilliant and clear. If however you desire a (relatively) more cursory introduction, buy Omnes' more recent book "Understanding Quantum Mechanics", which in my opinion is even more brilliant. The desire to write for beginners and not for experts has apparently improved his writing a lot with respect to the present book.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to be the dominant point of view (at least implicitly) for both undergraduate and graduate quantum mechanics courses. This is certainly adequate for understanding a tremendous amount of quantum mechanics and doing pretty much any calculations one would want to do. However, this approach suffers some shortcomings and cannot be the last word. Among these shortcomings are the postulated existence of an external classical world, the fundamental role of measurement and the collapse of the wavefunction. Obviously any classical world is just an approximation of a quantum one and when considering the universe as a whole there is no external observer of any kind. Also, there can't be anything fundamentally special about a measurement.

From a practical point of view perhaps the main limitation of this is probably the study of quantum cosmology, which surely requires something beyond the Copenhagen interpretation. There is one additional additional problem this can lead to. It's not so much a problem for physics students or other serious scholars, but rather for those only engaging in casual thought about quantum mechanics. The problem is that elevating external observers and measurement to fundamental roles seems to lead to a lot of nonsense ideas, for example consious observers defining reality.

This book presents a thorough discussion that will help one to develop a more satisfying perspective of quantum mechanics. The level of the quantum mechanics assumed isn't high, mainly basic undergraduate quantum mechanics. The material in the book varies in difficulty from simple to fairly challenging. The material includes discussions of consistent histories, quantum logic, decoherence and many of the quantum mechanics paradoxes (EPR, Wigner's friend and of course the ubiquitous Schrodinger's cat). It's pretty clear that the last word on this subject hasn't been said, but this book contributes a lot to the discussion. I think quantum mechanical paradoxes in general are harder to resolve than the ones from relativity, but this book does a nice job of describing them and showing how they often arise from asking questions one isn't allowed to ask in the quantum framework (although these questions are perfectly sensible in the classical world).

This kind of material might not be absolutely required for physics students. However, in my opinion students (especially specialists in theoretical physics) should at least be familiar with most of the ideas, especially the consistent histories approach and decoherence. This book is very comprehensive and might be overkill for some who might prefer something more condensed, but I liked it a lot and found it well worth reading.

This edition is out of date. Update your listing with the 1999 edition

This book was not an accurate interpretation of what quantum mechanics should be consisting of