[davidivadavid]

Yeah, I think in some ways I've also adopted a sort of bimodal approach:

* If it's a somewhat technical topic, go straight for the textbook/papers. If you don't understand them, you won't understand them any better from reading the "pop" material. If it's too complex (say, quantum physics), walk back and get acquainted with more basic material.

* If it's not technical, e.g. popular non-fiction books, listen to a (couple) podcasts. If it sounds like there's more to it than the 5 bullet points the author keeps repeating, get the book. That doesn't happen very often.

[msla]

> If it's a somewhat technical topic, go straight for the textbook/papers. If you don't understand them, you won't understand them any better from reading the "pop" material. If it's too complex (say, quantum physics), walk back and get acquainted with more basic material.

OK, I've been holding this in and now I finally have an excuse to put it out there:

Trying to talk about quantum physics without math makes it more confusing, not less. You inevitably end up making some weird analogies which aren't analogous, things which an expert might be able to reverse-engineer into the actual concepts but which put a non-expert in a Lewis Carroll Bullshitland, which is like Wonderland only not as amusing and definitely not worth putting in a book, let alone a "physics" book.

At worst, you end up with crap which is actively wrong, like everything Deepak Chopra has ever said in his entire existence.

Meanwhile, you can give people a real understanding of basic quantum mechanics with high-school algebra and a bit of simple logic.

The deep reason behind this is the same damned interpretation problem physicists have failed to solve for nigh-on a century now. We have the math, we know it works, and, miracle of miracles, we can do some real physics with fairly simple mathematical models, but we don't know exactly how the math hooks up with reality. If none of Dirac, Bohm, Feynman, and Pauling could definitively solve this problem, the odds of a pop science author doing so are not worth thinking about.

To drag this back to the topic: A book about quantum physics which includes no math isn't worth reading.

[mcguire]

Is there any specific recomendations for: "Meanwhile, you can give people a real understanding of basic quantum mechanics with high-school algebra and a bit of simple logic"?

[msla]

> Is there any specific recomendations for: "Meanwhile, you can give people a real understanding of basic quantum mechanics with high-school algebra and a bit of simple logic"?

I had "Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum" in mind, but I forgot it used some simple calculus, too. It's easy enough to bootstrap from high-school algebra to the kind of calculus it uses, but my statement wasn't correct for that book.

But I'm being unfair: The volume on quantum mechanics is the second volume, and both differentiation and integration are explicitly explained in the first, on classical mechanics.

And there's a difference between using an equation and deriving it. If you don't expect to derive equations, you can still understand quantum mechanics in terms of state vectors, matrix operators, and complex amplitudes turning into probabilities without explicitly using a Lagrangian, which does unavoidably require calculus.

(And, yes, I consider basic matrix algebra and complex numbers to be high school algebra.)