The Postulates of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

Most of the fundamental concepts that are at the basis of quantum mechanics have already emerged during the discussion of the previous chapter. Now the problem is to formalize these concepts within a coherent structure, namely to go ‘from words to facts’. We will try to proceed in this process of formalization both by making good use of the already discussed examples and by arriving at the formal aspects of the theory as much as possible from the physical point of view (for example, this is the way we shall succeed in establishing that observable quantities are represented by operators on the space of states).