Customer Reviews

French Intro to Quantum Physics (The M.I.T. introductory physics series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

OK, so this book is old, having been written in the 1970s. For all that, it still does the core things excellently: namely focus on the Physics, the experiments, the theory, AND the people behind the advances.

After going through the antecedents of the classical atomic model, the authors quickly move onto the wave-particle duality. They describe, throughout, groundbreaking experimental work of the likes of Thompson and Davisson & Germer. After setting the foundations, French and Taylor go to the discussion of the one dimensional Schrodinger equation, its physical meaning, and several examples of solutions by means of qualitative plots.

Photons and Quantum States, Angular momentum, Atomic Systems, a detailed discussion of the Hydrogen atom and Radiation from atoms make up the rest of the book.

What I particularly like about this book is that it is grounded in the Physics, with experiment and theory given an equal footing. The authors are gentle with their use of mathematics. The concept of operators is applied to the physical problem. This, despite what to some people would be the book's "old fashioned" nature, is refreshing. Too often, the authors of modern books on Quantum Physics "pose" with fancy mathematics to try to impress their colleagues or students.

This book is easy to read, there are plenty of worked examples and end of chapter exercises to keep the student busy. I recommend this book thoroughly.

This book should seriously be used ONLY with another text. A good one (in my opinion) is Griffiths. It goes into great depth (sometimes too much) conceptually and is very weak with the mathematics. Another reviewer said somethings about not giving many applications, and i agree. It gets the idea down, but no more than that. Griffiths along side this is awesome, and if you have time after those two, take a look at Shakars book; its a little harder mathematically, but if you hit those three together, youll prolly have a good idea of what QM is about. Feynman Lectures also help.
Point being: Dont use this book alone, very good otherwise.

This is a typical college text book written in intoductory level. Its approac is classical and explains the concepts relatively slow with examples. The mathematical language used is not modern in a sense that does not use operator language with high symbolizm but rather more classical approach. For students that are used to apply more classical Diff.equations or Real anaylsis, it is much easier even though they implicitly do the same with or without operators. If I were to chose only one book to read, I would have to select the book written by Resnick but obviously the more you read the more view points you will have and of course you will have less time to develop your own. In my opinion this is better than Feynmann Vol.3.

Several of the other reviews here express my general, very positive feelings about this book, so I'll concentrate on two specific examples which illustrate the teaching emphasis of the book's authors.

Chapters 6 and 7 introduce quantum states with a brilliant discussion of Dirac's bracket notation using polarization of light as the driving example. The student at this level typically already knows what to expect when, for example, linearly polarized light passes through a linear analyzer oriented at an angle with respect to the polarization axis. The authors develop a set of projection amplitudes for linear and circular polarization which reproduce the results familiar to the student. This makes state vectors easy to understand and, in turn, it's much easier to learn and accept the less intuitive results which come from solving more complex problems later on. I would recommend this book for these two chapters alone.

In Chapter 9 the authors in just a few pages develop a simple but quantitative theory of alpha decay which is easy to follow and relates half-life (or decay constant) to alpha-particle energy with no adjustable parameters. They then compare their result to experiment and show agreement over 24 orders of magnitude of half-life. This example wonderfully illustrates the power of simple, clear reasoning to achieve a widely applicable result. Fantastic job!

I own three or four introductory quantum mechanics texts, but this is the one I turn to first.

Although I would agree that this is probably the best book to begin your study of quantum mechanics with, there are still serious flaws with the book. I just finished taking a class that used this text and I found that a major problem is that it never actually 'get's to the point.' Instead of telling you how to apply a technique to solving problems, the text simply assumes that you'll be able to figure that out yourself. So much of the notation goes unexplained and important points go unemphasized. I would suggest using this book if you're a first time student of quantum mechanics but supplement it with another book that explains how to do problems (Liboff or Griffiths).

This is one of the clearest and well thought out introductions on quantum physics that I've seen. It is beautifully written with abundant diagrams and examples. The chapter on photons and polarization is an excellent pedagogical approach to understanding state vectors. This will also come in handy later on in a more advanced course when trying to understand the motivations behind the postulates of quantum mechanics.

This book was ahead of its time when it was published in 1978 and is still one of the better intro texts that stresses the basic principles and the experimental justifications. AP French is well-known for a whole series of rigorous intro physics texts he wrote for MIT students in the 1970s.

The explanations and theoretical foundation in this book are very carefully laid out for the reader. Combined with insightful end-of-chapter problems, this is the preferred text for the able honors freshman/sophomore before he/she moves on to Griffiths's quantum mechanics book.

When I was in college many years ago using Tipler's Modern Physics text for an intro to quantum mechanics and special relativity, it was the French/Taylor book that gave me the solid foundation I needed for the quantum mechanics part. Although co-author EF Taylor said on his personal website that this book is dated, I still find it - after all these years - a great starting point for the serious beginning physics undergraduate.

This book is very pedagogical. It follows a logical order in presenting the very complicated development of quantum physics. It's like taking a step back and collecting your thoughts. No physics student or physics teacher should be without it.

I would recommend this book on quantum physics for someone just learning the subject because it guides you through the quantum landscape by focusing on the Physics instead of just the math.

I give the book 4 stars the main one being you will really need another textbook if you are going to get serious about quantum mechanics such as Shankar's "Principles of Quantum Mechanics". Also was the problems at the end of each chapter, I would say most of the problems are really good with varying levels of difficulty but some are also pretty lame in my opinion but every textbook has that problem. What I did like was I was able to find online numerous solutions to the problems on the internet without too much difficulty because a lot of colleges still use this textbook for their introductory quantum mechanics courses.

I also recommend Leonard Susskind's Quantum Mechanics lectures on you tube, he uses the Dirac Bracket notation but explains the topic so you get again get a good feel for the physics.

This volume, part of the MIT Introductory Series, is appropriate for the advanced undergraduate in physics or the graduate student changing majors from engineering to physics, as a prerequisite to taking a graduate Quantum Mechanics course at the level of Cohen-Tanoudji. Presupposing a solid foundation in partial differential equations and boundary value problems as well as dynamics and electrodynamics, the authors develop quantum theory in a logical manner and in a very readable style. The text is full of examples that reinforce the material throughout. Moreover, there are abundant illustrations to aid in grasping trends in analyzing wave functions and probability densities. The artful introduction of the Dirac notation, formalism, quantum states and state vectors is accomplished using photons and polarization. Although not intended as a core graduate student level text for Quantum Mechanics, the volume integrates its scope with more advanced topics including the WKB method and perturbation theory. Included are problem sets at the end of each chapter that reinforce the presented materials. This text is an excellent bridge between basic undergraduate quantum mechanics and graduate quantum mechanics.