Customer Reviews

Diagrammatica: The Path to Feynman Diagrams (Cambridge Lecture Notes in Physics)

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This is a book on quantum field theory using, much more than what is usual, the language of Feynman diagrams, which are pictorial-analytic expressions for terms of the perturbative series for S-matrix elements. Several years ago what could be considered a cruder version of this book circulated widely as a Yellow Report from CERN. It was an admirable text, from which most of us learned how to write the Feynman rules for gauge theories in exotic gauges, and how to renormalize everything by using the dimensional methods. Now comes the book version, polished so that beginners can use it, and with a little more tissue connecting the bones. The Yellow Report was called Diagrammar and became something of a religion. Perusing the book I see no reason why it should not have a comparable success. I particularly admire the graphic derivation of the Ward identities and the (also graphical) treatment of unitarity, very difficult to find antwhere else. The author, Veltman, is a great! authority in Field Theory and a fantastic teacher.

This is a QFT book written by a physicist (Veltman is one of the
1999 Physics Nobel prize winners) for physicists. Mathematical
rigour was definitely not one of Veltman's major concerns when he
wrote this book. However clarity was indeed a big issue for him
and that is most unusual if you take into account that most Nobel
prize awarded physicist, are usually much more concerned about
"image", "posterity" and "mathematical rigour" than by
pedagogical matters.

This book is a very good one to start with if you want to learn
QFT. It makes no use of the path integral formalism (which is the
prefered one by "modern" QFT theorists) . The canonical
formalism (the one used in this book) makes explicit the local
nature of QFT; this is an important issue since locallity stems
from Lorentz invariance and QFT is nothing but the physical
theory resulting from quantum mechanics and restricted
relativity. I fully agree with the statement that the path
integral method should be sistematically discarded in
introductory QFT books like this one.


As its title indicates, Feynman diagrams are the central issue of
this book. Veltman explains in the introduction: "This is then
the aim: to make it clear which principles are behind the
(Feynman) rules and to define clarly the calculation details".
This seems to be the natural choice for such an introductory
text; quoting Veltman again: " ... the theory (meaning QFT), or
rather the succesful part (of it), is perturbation theory ...
Perturbation theory means Feynman diagrams ".

This book provides a clear logical frame that supports the
calculation machinery of perturbative QFT's and should be
recommended to any person willing to introduce himself/herself in
Quantum Field Theory as a first choice course book.


Taking into account that this is an introductory book, its
short extension (200 pages) its scope is limited to QED and no
serious attempt is made to treat non-abelian theories.

One minor (for me it is minor, since my english is also rather
poor) annoyance: Even I (my mother tonge is spanish) can see
that the writing style is not very good and that some of the used
expressions are nothing more that literal translations from dutch
into english.

it's a CERN yellow report from the 1970s sometime. this is the revision and printed version of it. he knows what he is doing, or at least the nobel commitee thought so when he got the prize with t'hooft. anyway it's called diagrammar and you can download it from the CERN site.

This book takes any engineer with a feel for Maxwell's equations and a little common sense about Schroedinger's equation into the promissed land of quantum field theory.

Veltman spends a lot of time helping the reader get his or her head wrapped around the idea of Hilbert space. This cleared my head for what was to follow.

It is one of the few books that does not assume you already know the subject. I recommend it for electrical engineers like myself. No idea is hard to understand when the author values communicating notions over notation!

Five stars for Martinus Veltman!

I just browsed through this book in a bookshop, so I can't judge its quality (I copied the 5 stars from the current average), but I didn't buy it because I noticed it apparently uses the imaginary time convention! I thought this convention was completely obsolete and thus I am not inclined to buy such a book. Well, Veltman shows how to convert all formulas to conventional metrics in an appendix, but for me this shows how weird the book really is: after all, conventional metrics courses do not show you how to convert their formulas to imaginary time metrics.