Quantum Mechanics: Principles, New Perspectives, Extensions and Interpretation – Revised Edition

$115.00

Olavo Leopoldino da Silva Filho
Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Física, Núcleo de Física Estatística e Física Matemática, Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro, Brazil

Series: Physics Research and Technology
BISAC: SPO058000

The book Quantum Mechanics: Principles, New Perspectives, Extensions and Interpretation – Revised Edition deals with the foundations of Quantum Mechanics in a quite novel way. From his own published works throughout these last 20 years in prominent Journals, Prof. L.S.F. Olavo reconstructs Quantum Mechanics (as related to the Schrödinger equation) from the scratch, both in mathematical and interpretive ways.

The picture that emerges is quite different from the one we get from other approaches. While the mainstream approach reinforces some unavoidable weirdness in the Quantum World, Prof. Olavo’s interpretation presents Quantum Mechanics as quite an intuitive theory, using only the pedestrian notions of randomness, fluctuations and the companion notion of statistics. However, it is much more than another stochastic approach. Throughout the first part of the book, Prof. Olavo shows how the various roads to derive the Schrödinger equation can be reduced to his own mathematical construction: Feynman’s path integral and the stochastic approach are but two of them. The book also brings about quite new results, such as the connection between Quantum Mechanics and the Central Limit Theorem and Langevin Equations (by means of which quantum phenomena can be easily simulated and make visualizable). All this is done taking recourse to only three axioms.

This strategy gives the book an impressive power of synthesis in what respects the interpretation of the formalism. In fact, in the last part of the book, Prof. Olavo shows how some of the innumerous proposals for the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, with some of their constructs, can help us making a rational reconstruction of a Quantum World without any weirdness whatsoever.

In the second part, to remove some of the various obstacles to a Quantum Mechanics without weirdness, the book deals with the most prominent aspects and experiments of the Quantum, such as spin and the Stern-Gerlach experiment, the construction of operators and also Identical Particles.

In the third part, the book presents a fully special and general relativistic extension of the formalism by just making the extension of the three postulates used throughout the first part.

This book is intended to all those interested in the foundations of Quantum Mechanics. (Imprint: Nova)

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Tables

List of Figures

Part I. Principles

Chapter 1. Historical Background – XIXth Century and Beyond

Chapter 2. The Characteristic Function Derivation

Chapter 3. The Entropy Derivation

Chapter 4. The Stochastic Derivation

Chapter 5. Quantum Mechanics and the Central Limit Theorem

Chapter 6. Langevin Equations for Quantum Mechanics

Part II. New Perspectives

Chapter 7. Classical Representation of the Spin

Chapter 8. Operator Formation and Phase Space Distributions

Chapter 9. On Reality, Locality and Bell’s Inequalities

Chapter 10. Indistinguishability

Part III. Relativistic Extension

Chapter 11. Special and General Relativistic Quantum Mechanics

Part IV. Interpretation

Chapter 12. The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

References

Index

References

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