The Black Book of Quantum Physics

or: Bad Maths that Gets the Right Answer

Cooper Doyle

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A derivation of the most important laws of quantum physics using nothing but a pen, a few thought experiments, and two experimental results.

This book began as graduate lecture notes and became something else: an argument that quantum mechanics is not a collection of weird facts imposed on us by experiment, but the inevitable destination of classical mechanics taken seriously enough. Starting from a mass on a spring, and following the logic wherever it goes, we arrive at the Dirac equation in seven steps.

Contents

Part	Topic
I	Introduction
II	The Mechanics of Heaven and Earth
III	Light
IV	The Jacobi Conspiracy
V	The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
VI	The Born Ultimatum
VII	Creation and Annihilation
VIII	Dirac's Coup

Compiling

The book is written in LaTeX using the krantz document class.

pdflatex main.tex
bibtex main
pdflatex main.tex
pdflatex main.tex

Figures are in /img as SVG files. Convert to PDF before compiling:

for f in img/*.svg; do inkscape "$f" --export-pdf="${f%.svg}.pdf"; done

Or switch to xelatex, which handles SVG natively via the svg package.

A compiled PDF is included in the repository for those who just want to read it.

Prerequisites

• A LaTeX distribution (TeX Live or MiKTeX)
• The krantz class (included in most distributions)
• Inkscape (for SVG to PDF conversion) or xelatex

Status

Work in progress. The core derivation is complete. Remaining work is polish and figures.

License

© Cooper Doyle. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without permission.