As other reviewers have remarked this is an excellent book, and if you are interested in really learning quantum mechanics, this is where I'd recommend you start.
Here are some of the things I particularly liked about this book, and some of the ways I thought it could have been better.
The first chapter provides the necessary mathematical background for quantum mechanics. It is a long chapter, but very well done. Regardless, make no mistake, you should not attempt this book at all without a solid background in differential equations and linear algebra. This chapter is very helpful though as a review and for fixing notation. I also approved of its stated goal: to put the math first rather than trying to interleave it with the physics. Physics is hard enough without trying to tackle the math and the physics at the same time.
Chapter two is a quick review of classical mechanics. Advanced classical mechanics. If you are not already comfortable with the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics before you attempt this book, well you probably shouldn't attempt this book. But if you are, this chapter is an excellent and concise review done with an eye towards quantum mechanics.
Chapter four presents quantum mehcanics in a postulatory manner, and builds the subject deductively from there. Of the quantum mechanics books I've read, the ones that proceed in this fashion tend to be clearest, and this one is no exception.
Chapter five presents a collection of one dimensional problems. This chapter is one of the few that I felt could have been better. I did not think there was enough discussion of tunneling and scattering, which struck me as odd. Certainly I have seen other introductions to quantum mechanics do a better job with these topics.
Chapter ten is on systems with more degrees of freedom and covers the tricky subject of identical particles in quantum mechanics. It is a very clear treatment.
Chapters twelve and thirteen extend the treatment to three dimensional systems and the Hydrogen atom in particular. While good, I thought the author could have done a better job building intuition for the special functions that appear in this section of the book, like the spherical harmonics. The author even states that many other books provide graphs and additional information for these very important functions. Ok, so why not this one as well? For a book that is so complete in so many other ways, this omission seemed odd.
Chapters fourteen and fifteen cover spin and the addition of angular momentum. Challenging topics in quantum mechanics. For the most part the discussion is very lucid, and among the best I've seen.
Chapters sixteen through eigthteen cover approximation methods. They are superb. Chapter eighteen is a particular standout here. The discussion of the quantization of the electromagnetic field is outstanding, and very unusual in an introductory book.
Chapter nineteen is on scattering, and is probably the clearest introduction to this (rather tricky) subject I have seen.
Chapter twenty is on the Dirac equation. Almost never seen in an introductory book, this is again an outstanding feature of this work.
Finally, as other reviewers have mentioned, this book discusses path integrals in two chapters: eight and twenty-one. These discussions are five star worthy. This topic is also highly unusual in an introductory book, but as the author points out it is of central importance in contemporary physics.
The last chapter -- twenty-one -- is definitely the most advanced in the book. It disusses the Quantum Hall Effect, the imaginary time formalism, the connections between quantum mechanics, quantum statistical mechanics, and classical statistical mechanics via path integrals, and ends with discussion of fermionic path integrals which are central to quantum field theory. All of these are advanced topics, and the author does an excellent job preparing the reader to tackle them. Kudos!
There are numerous problems throughout, most of which are rather simple.
This is an excellent book for anyone looking really to sink their teeth into QM.
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Reviews with images
Bad printing, good writing
If you read around you will find that this printing has a lot of issues. Personally, I don't really care for about most of the problems except how poorly the text is aligned (close to the binding). It is jarring to find some pages with inconsistent black ink coloring, or the feel of the paper, while thick does remind me of standard home printer paper. Mine also has this awkward bowing on the binding, which I think is from tension as opposed to damage. I suppose it can be frustrating that an expensive text be so poorly produced.As for the book, I really like it. The mathematical introduction starts off very basic but gets more involved, though should be still a complete review for the reader. The rest covers much of graduate QM well with reasonable pedagogy, though I believe this by itself is not enough and you might need a second source.
Top reviews from other countries
Kurt Wagner Gray
Versão para Kindle não funciona
Reviewed in Brazil on February 8, 2024J boy
Fantastic book if you're not sure what maths you need.
Reviewed in Australia on January 17, 2024
