Understanding Quantum Mechanics

The growth of quantum mechanics has been like a giant jigsaw puzzle, to which numerous imaginative minds have made diverse and individual contributations. Its kaleidoscopic nature presents different and startling facets depending on how one twists and turns the formalism. The main difficulty of quantum mechanics is in interpreting it. In this compact and readable book, being much less technical and more explanatory, the author endeavours to explain the interpretation of quantum mechanics, simply and completely as far as possible.
The book presents a more streamlined version of the Copenhagen interpretation, showing its logic consistency and completeness. The theory of quantum measurements represents another important contribution to interpretation, and the author surveys its history from Planck to Heisenberg before describing the recent advances that led to a revision of the old interpretation. The author particularly highlights three of them:

• The decoherence effect related to the modern resolution of the famous Schr”dinger's cat problem.
• An exact formulation of the correspondence between quantum and particle physics implying a derivation of classical determinism from quantum probabilism.
• The constitution of a universal and sound language of interpretation using the so-called consistent histories.

The book is addressed to students of physics both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels who have acquired some elementary knowledge of the quantum theory. It will also be useful to physicists and mathematicians who wish to refresh their memory and see what the present state of interpretation is.