| This book is the “verbatim” transcription of the introductory lectures on quantum mechanics that I delivered for more than 25 years at the ´Ecole Polytechnique. It is not a textbook. I was dragged into writing it by friends, among whom are many former students of mine. For sure, this text is obviously less complete than a textbook.
The argument that eventually convinced me to write this book is that the textbooks I had written on the subject, both in French and in English, were terribly deprived of life, action, thoughts, and the questioning that I always liked to put in my narrative account of the ideas and applications of the subject. The human aspect of the experimental investigations and of the ensuing discovery of basic principles made the lectures lively (besides the fact that the mind needs to rest a few minutes following a difficult argument). I always thought that teaching science is incomplete if it does not incorporate the human dimension, be it of the lecturer, of the audience, or of the topic to which it is devoted.
What is true is that the students at the ´Ecole Polytechnique, who were all selected after a stiff entrance examination, and whose ambitions in life were diverse – in science, in industry, in business, in high public office – all had to follow this introductory physics course. As a consequence, the challenge was to try to get them interested in the field whatever their future goals were. Of course, quantum mechanics is an ideal subject because one can be interested in it for a variety of reasons, such as the physics itself, the mathematical structure of the theory, its technological spinoffs, as well as its philosophical or cultural aspects. So the task was basically to think about the pedagogical aspects, in order to satisfy audiences that went up to 500 students during the last 10 years. |