I added an Annex to a paper that talks about all of the fancy stuff quantum physicists like to talk about, like scattering matrices and high-energy particle events. The Annex, however, is probably my simplest and shortest summary of the ordinariness of wavefunction math, including a quick overview of what quantum-mechanical operators actually are. It does not make use of state vector algebra or the usual high-brow talk about Gilbert spaces and what have you: you only need to know what a derivative is, and combine it with our realist interpretation of what the wavefunction actually represents.
I think I should do a paper on the language of physics. To show how (i) rotations (i, j, k), (ii) scalars (constants or just numerical values) and (iii) vectors (real vectors (e.g. position vectors) and pseudovectors (e.g. angular frequency or momentum)), and (iv) operators (derivatives of the wavefunction with respect to time and spatial directions) form ‘words’ (e.g. energy and momentum operators), and how these ‘words’ then combine into meaningful statements (e.g. Schroedinger’s equation).
All of physics can then be summed up in a half-page or so. All the rest is thermodynamics 🙂 JL
PS: You only get collapsing wavefunctions when adding uncertainty to the models (i.e. our own uncertainty about the energy and momentum). The ‘collapse’ of the wavefunction (let us be precise, the collapse of the (dissipating) wavepacket) thus corresponds to the ‘measurement’ operation. 🙂
PS2: Incidentally, the analysis also gives an even more intuitive explanation of Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence relation, which I summarize in a reply to one of the many ‘numerologist’ physicists on ResearchGate (copied below).
Reading Feynman 