About The Book
When this classic text was first published in 1935, it fulfilled the goal of its authors “to produce a textbook of practical quantum mechanics for the chemist, the experimental physicist, and the beginning student of theoretical physics.” Although many who are teachers today once worked with the book as students, the text is still as valuable for the same undergraduate audience. Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, Research Professor at the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, Palo Alto, California, and E. Bright Wilson, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Harvard University, provide a readily understandable study of “wave mechanics,” discussing the Schrodinger wave equation and the problems which can be solved with it. Extensive knowledge of mathematics is not required, although the student must have a grasp of elementary mathematics through the calculus. Pauling and Wilson begin with a survey of classical mechanics, including Newton’s equations of motion in the Lagrangian form, and then move on to the “old” quantum theory, developed through the work of Planck, Einstein and Bohr. This analysis leads to the heart of the book an explanation of quantum mechanics which, as Schrodinger formulated it, “involves the renunciation of the hope of describing in exact detail the behavior of a system.
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