This is not a Wikipedia article: It is an individual user's work-in-progress page, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. New content for Introduction to quantum mechanics. Status: first draft.

Topic list

What is quantum mechanics?
Why is quantum mechanics difficult to understand?
- Quantum world fundamentally different (intro).
  - Invisible
  - Different properties.
  - Ubiquity.
- Indirect information: observations.
  - Submicroscopic scale.
  - Macroscopic human senses.
  - Information through interaction.
- Interaction causes alteration.
  - Observations alter.
  - Environment alters (decoherence).
- Models predicting observations.
  - Analogies to directly observable systems.
  - Numerical observations require mathematical models.
- Limitations of non-mathematical descriptions.
  - Limitations of mathematical description.
    - Observers obey QM (Heisenberg cut)
    - Bad data to start (unmeasurable initial conditions)

(I especially like the last entry--there are so many descriptions of the randomness in the double-slit experiment that fail to mention that "coherent light" is quite noisy: each individual photon has its own path--direction and offset through the slits, and they are not well aligned with each other. No wonder physicists have been quick to say that QM itself is all random, when it is not. There is nothing random about the Schrödinger equation. David Spector (talk) 17:43, 18 July 2023 (UTC))

User:Johnjbarton/sandbox/introduction to quantum mechanics

Topic list