Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory free download online
Title: Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory Author(s): Werner Heisenberg Pages: 184 Publisher: Dover Publications Publication date: 1930 Language: English Format: PDF ISBN-10: 0486601137 ISBN-13: Description: A great historical perspective on quantum mechanics .... Nobel laureate Heisenberg, presenting a complete physical picture of quantum theory, covers not only his own far-reaching contributions to quantum theory, but also those of Dirac, Schroedinger, Compton, Wilson, Einstein and others.
Not really for beginners in spite of appearances, this book sketches Heisenberg's path in discovering the canonical commutation rules of quantum mechanics. After trying unsuccessfully for years to quantize the helium atom via the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization rules (which attempt Einstein had already explained in 1917 to be hopeless, because the classical 3-body problem is nonintegrable), Heisenberg was finally motivated by the example of relativity (where absolute time had to be abandoned) to give up the assumption that the position and momentum of a point particle are simultaneously predictable. To follow Heisenberg's reasoning the reader must first understand action-angle variables in classical mechanics. With Einstein's 1917 paper in hindsight, the three body problem representing the helium atom energy spectrum was finally approximated semi-clasically around 1990 based on a path-integral approximation to a chaotic Hamiltonian system.
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Title: Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory