Spetroscopy and quantum mechanics.

Been thinking about how to write a quantum mechanics textbook. I've grown increasingly disappointed with the way most are written. Most start with a historical overview of how the theory was developed, then work through more and more complicated wavefunctions, and then at the end, if there's time, cram in a little bit of the stuff you actually need to do to do something useful with quantum mechanics.

For some reason, this doesn't work for me. I'd like to see one that starts off right away with a practical discussion of the theoretical framework (and notation) we actually use. I think the minimum background for that is just a discussion of spectroscopy. The existence of line spectra allows one to start with a notion of quantized light, and quantized states (a discussion of the photoelectric effect might also be needed). Then once you have states, you can immediately introduce dirac notation. Later, once you've discussed operators, expectation values, eigenvalues, eigenfunctions, superposition of wavefunctions, transition dipoles, and all the linear algebra like bits that give the "big picture" view, if there's time, you can muck about with the calculus to show how to calculate matrix elements.

Not my most approachable blog topic, but hey, trying to get into updating thsi thing regularly, and it was something I've been musing.

Happy things

You know, a world with Serenity in it is better. I'm feeling happier, and well, more serene for having watched it. Yay.