There have been other pages of recommended reading on Less Wrong before (and elsewhere), but this post is unique.
What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Other textbooks are exciting, accurate, fair, well-paced, and immediately useful. The ones on American history and sociology were memorably bad, in my case. I was forced to read some awful textbooks in college. Make progress by accumulation, not random walks.īut textbooks vary widely in quality. Less Wrong has often recommended the "read textbooks!" method.
That's what they are designed to be, after all. I've since discovered that textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material. I learned by consuming blog posts, Wikipedia articles, classic texts, podcast episodes, popular books, video lectures, peer-reviewed papers, Teaching Company courses, and Cliff's Notes. The second chapter-especially when you include all the exercises at the end of the chapter-is an essential reference for one-dimensional quantum mechanics, a topic that's growing in relevance with increasing experimental capacity to engineer effectively one-dimensional systems such as solid state quantum wires or tight optical waveguides for ultracold atoms.For years, my self-education was stupid and wasteful. I've taught the second edition several times and found that the impedance matching between the content and previous student knowledge allows clear signal transmission. I would argue that if you want to teach a waves-first course, there is no better starting place than the first two chapters of the book, lightly revised and improved from the previous edition. The Griffiths and Schroeter (G&S) text falls squarely in the waves-first camp. Roughly speaking, there are two main approaches to teaching undergraduate quantum mechanics: waves-first or spins-first (other approaches include historical (an especially good fit for sophomore-level modern physics classes) and formalism-first (perhaps better for graduate quantum courses)).
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