The many subtleties of postulates are never spelled out. For example, the Schrödinger equation specialized to the position space is given from the get-go with the motivation that it is the quantum equivalence of Newton's equation of motion, which is true, but not really helpful a child may be familiar with the notion of forces, but not Hamiltonians and complex amplitudes. The formalism is not developed logically, and, overall, the book is very weak in formalism.

The author takes the shut-up-and-calculate approach to the extreme (like how standard freshman physics textbooks present QM). This is not helped by the fact that the book shies away from the math of QM: linear algebra and the concise Dirac notation, which is introduced but quickly discarded. The bad: While a step by step calculation makes it easy to follow, one often gets lost in details and misses the big picture. For example, Griffiths takes his time to explain standard deviations, separation of variables, and phase and group velocity in the beginning. The second chapter-especially when you include all the exercises at the end of the chapter-is an essential reference for one-dimensional quantum mechanics, a topic that's growing in relevance with increasing experimental capacity to engineer effectively one-dimensional systems such as solid state quantum wires or tight optical waveguides for ultracold atoms.Update (05/15/16): tl dr: I would give this book more stars if it is titled 'Introduction to Wave Mechanics.'įirst, the good: this book doesn't require mastery of 'advanced' classical physics and math such as Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, electromagnetism, partial differential equations, linear algebra, or statistics.

I've taught the second edition several times and found that the impedance matching between the content and previous student knowledge allows clear signal transmission.

I would argue that if you want to teach a waves-first course, there is no better starting place than the first two chapters of the book, lightly revised and improved from the previous edition. The Griffiths and Schroeter (G&S) text falls squarely in the waves-first camp. Roughly speaking, there are two main approaches to teaching undergraduate quantum mechanics: waves-first or spins-first (other approaches include historical (an especially good fit for sophomore-level modern physics classes) and formalism-first (perhaps better for graduate quantum courses)).

Quantum mechanics textbook griffiths