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The Only Quantum Mechanics Book You Need as a Beginner
If you want to avoid technical books full of intimidating math
Leonard Susskind’s The Theoretical Minimum, written with Art Friedman, is a gem for anyone just starting to explore quantum physics. It’s not one of those popular science books that skims the surface with analogies, nor is it one of those heavy, technical books full of intimidating math. The book is perfectly balanced: it uses only high school-level math — think algebra and a bit of calculus — while building your knowledge on the fundamentals of quantum theory from the ground up. This is one of the earliest books I used during my undergraduate years and trust me, it works wonders.
One of the most wonderful things about the TTM is that it focuses on what the authors call the “theoretical minimum” — nothing more than the fundamental concepts and techniques you need to begin learning about physics.
Susskind, also known as the bad boy of physics, is a much-acclaimed physicist and educator (you must have watched some of his stanford lectures on general relativity or black holes), starts with something simple: a single particle with spin and qubits. This modest starting point allows him to introduce increasingly abstract notions such as state vectors, operators, and bra-ket notation. By exposing you to the topic in small steps rather than dropping you into complicated wave functions or the Schrödinger equation right away, the book ensures you grasp fundamentals like superposition and measurement before moving on to more challenging material such as entanglement and particle dynamics.
The problems in the middle of each chapter allow you to test your progress along the way.
A specific highlight of the book is how it does not shy away from tackling the “weird” aspects of quantum mechanics. It covers abstract concepts — uncertainty and time dependence, for example — in a manner that foregrounds their connection to the underlying mathematics. Entanglement (chapter 6), for instance, receives a detailed treatment where it often only gets a passing mention elsewhere, focusing…
