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And how to read it

Instructions on how to read, subscribe and follow this Substack.

For the occasional posts, the subscription to “Quantum Physics: An Overview of a Weird World” is free. While, my main activity will be that of publishing the sections and chapters of a new and revised edition of my book. Explore the full program in the table of contents below. Book excerpt #1 & #2 remain freely available. If you would like to learn more about me and my research, please visit my website.

You can read all the past and upcoming excerpts of the book as it unfolds as a paid subscriber. If you find value in my posts and would like to support my work, consider to…

Otherwise, you can make a small financial contribution by buying me one or more coffees. You can also support me by ordering one of my books or follow one of my online courses. Thank you in advance!

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Table of contents

I. Quantum Prehistory: Particles, Waves, and Light

1. The Question of Light’s Nature

2. Patterns of Light and Shadow: The Physics of Waves and Interference

3. Young’s Double-Slit Experiment: The Provisional Triumph of the Wave Theory

II. The birth of quantum physics

1. The Blackbody Radiation, the Ultraviolet Catastrophe and the Quantum: Part I & Part II

2. More Evidence for Particles: the Photoelectric Effect

3. Bohr’s atomic model

4. Even More Evidence for Particles: the Franck-Hertz Experiment, Compton Scattering and Pair Production

5. Waves strike back again: Bragg diffraction and the De Broglie hypothesis
   Part I & Part II & Part III.

III. The first foundations of quantum physics

1. The wave-particle duality
   Part I & Part II & Part III

2. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
   Part I & Part II & Part III

3. The wave function and its ‘collapse’
   Part I & Part II

4. The state vector and the projection postulate

5. Quantum Operators and the Schrödinger’s equation
   Part I & Part II

6. From a particle in a box to atomic physics

IV. The quantum world of spinning particles

1. Angular momentum in classical mechanics

2. Spin, the Stern-Gerlach experiment and the commutation relations

3. Is information fundamental?

4. The spinning world of spinors

5. The photon’s polarization and spin

V. Quantum ubiquity and randomness

1. The quantum superposition principle: being in two states at the same time

2. The time-energy uncertainty relation

3. The quantum tunneling effect: the impossible jumps

4. Zero-point energy, virtual particles and the Casimir effect

5. The Bohr-Einstein debate and the Copenhagen interpretation

VI. Quantum entanglement

1. Quantum scattering and indistinguishability

2. Quantum entanglement basics

3. The EPR paradox (original version)

4. The EPR paradox (modern version)

5. Faster than light transmissions?

6. Schrödinger’s cat paradox, quantum decoherence and the measurement problem

7. Wigner’s friend paradox

VII. Digging deeper into the quantum realm

1. Bosons, Fermions and Pauli’s exclusion principle or: why is matter ‘hard’?

2. Why is matter ‘stable’?

3. Phase matters: the Aharonov–Bohm effect

4. Path integrals and Feynman diagrams

5. The quantum Zeno effect

VIII. Bell’s legacy

1. Is the Moon there when nobody looks?

2. Photon entanglement

3. Polarization correlation coefficients

4. Bell’s inequality

5. Bell’s theorem: what is reality?

6. Corollary: The Kochen-Specker Theorem

IX. Quantum ontology reborn

1. The Mach-Zehnder interferometer

2. The ‘which-way’ experiments

3. Interaction-free experiments: How to detect a bomb without interacting with it

4. The delayed choice experiments

5. The Hong-Ou-Mandel non-classical interference

X. Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

1. The de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation

2. The Many Worlds Interpretation

3. Superdeterminism

4. Objective collapse theory

5. Time symmetric quantum mechanics

6. The transactional interpretation

7. Relational quantum mechanics

8. The Copenhagen Interpretation and QBism

XI. Philosophical idealism for quantum physics - Part I

1. Philosophical idealism: a scientific approach.

2. An Aristotelian-Platonic-Kantian interpretation of quantum mechanics

XII. Concluding remarks and an outlook to volume II

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Alternatively, if you find value in my posts and would like to support my work, you can make a small financial contribution by buying me one or more coffees. You can also support me by ordering one of my books or follow one of my online courses. Thank you in advance!

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Entangled photons can be produced when an ultraviolet laser beam strikes a crystal with nonlinear optical properties. There is a small probability that one of the photons will spontaneously decay into a pair of photons with longer wavelengths (the set of red-green-blue and blue-green-red concentric rings above). Under certain conditions one of the “down-converted” photons will be polarized horizontally and the other will be polarized vertically. If the down-converted beams are made to overlap, the photons carry no individual polarizations – all we know is that the polarizations are different. This is an “entangled state”-that is, a physical condition that correlates two distant photons as an undifferentiated quantum state. Such states can be used both to test theorems of quantum physics and various applications in quantum information – see boxes. (Courtesy: University of Innsbruck)