Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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51 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent introductory text book if you want to learn, April 28, 2004
I used this text book for my undergraduate quantum mechanics class. In that class, we covered basically everything in Griffiths. I have since gone on to graduate school. I have found myself very well prepared and I still use Griffiths as a reference because it explains basic ideas and basic problems better than most other text books. More importantly, it provided me with a good foundation for further study.This text book is a great introductory text book. It is a text book for students for whom quantum mechanics is a new subject. It is not a text book for people who already know any significant amount of quantum mechanics, nor is it a great text to use for independent study (unless you work the problems and have some way of checking yourself.) Shankar is too advanced for most students new to the subject. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. The only school I know of which uses it is Yale, and they count on students having a stronger background than most students at most schools have. Moreover, I know from personal experience that teachers at Yale focus on getting students to calculate the right answer rather than developing a solid understanding of the ideas behind the physics. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. Griffiths is designed such that it can be used for the quantum mechanics classes at most universities -- ie, if students haven't had every other physics class before they use this book or if some of their background is a little weak, they aren't screwed. This may not agree with some people's notions of how physics should be taught, but the reality is that you can't teach every physics class as if the students had already mastered every subject except that one. This is the reality at most universities. The fact that this book is accessible does not make it bad. Physics is a wonderful, beautiful subject and we're being really stupid if we judge how "advanced" a book is by how difficult it is to understand. This is a suicidal attitude for our field. I've been reading physics books for a long time, and most of the ones which are difficult to read are difficult because they're not well written, not because the material is inherently difficult. This book also cannot compensate for its misuse or for bad teaching. When I took the class, the teacher assigned some of the basic problems and some of the difficult problems. That way we made sure we knew the basics before we moved on to the difficult problems. If you're only doing the simple problems, it's your fault you're not getting anything out of it. If you're only doing the computationally difficult problems, you're missing some beautiful, simple examples. The physics is neither more real nor more important if it takes you a day to calculate rather than ten minutes. This is a problem-centered book, but honestly, that's the way most of us learn. We don't remember things we read as well as we remember things we do. Similarly, new notation is not introduced until later because ideas are being developed first. Introducing too many things at once does not facilitate learning, only frustration. I suggest the people who think they already understand all of the ideas consider what Feynmann said -- "Nobody really understands quantum mechanics." If you want answers, look them up. If you want to learn, use this book.
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66 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect companion to more difficult texts, December 20, 2000
This introductory text by Griffiths has two major advantages: first it is exceedingly interesting to read, at such an extent one could believe the material is easy. Exercises are challenging enough to show it is just an impression. Second, the text covers a rather big amount of the (non-relativistic) theory, in a concision which is exemplar. It is a short text, which travels in the corners of the field: quantum statistics, solid state physics, perturbation theories, scattering... Of course the counterpart is those topics aren't dealt with at depth. This is a book to see things, before to work on them. For all those reasons, it is a very, very bad reference, but it is not its purpose. For example, the bra and ket formalism is introduced a bit lately, and its use is not stressed. The functional notation for what is currently referred to as |n, l, m> conceals the power of Dirac notations. Tensor product of Hilbert space are completely omitted, thus obscuring the (short but important) section on angular momenta, especially their addition. However, following the book's spirit, you have an opportunity to see Clebsch-Gordan coefficients at work, with their pretty cascading tables.The book is accessible without serious prerequisites, not even in electromagnetism, you just need to know the basis of calculus. Therefore it is the text to get if as a beginner you want to get acquainted with this fundamental piece of physics, along with learning your first physical theories (mechanics or electromagnetism). For others, it is useless to they who ever know pretty much of the theory, even as a review. To students who encounter this strange world for the first time, but with a fierce amount of classical knowledge on their back, I recommend it either as a companion to a more demanding detailed text--Shankar seeming the perfect pick--or as the only text if tremendous amount of personal work is to be furnished to fill in and explore by oneself what is missing. I wouldn't rely too much on it however.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fine, clearly written introduction, May 4, 2000
This is a well-written, beautifully done text for beginners. Though not a brilliant book like Dicke-Wittke (which sparked at every page and, alas, is out-of-print), it brings the message. Besides the more usual topics, I particularly liked the treatment of adiabatic processes and the Berry phase, which is the best I met in textbooks. The exercises are effective, and vary from routine to tough. I've met at least one which slightly strains, in its wording, the laws of electromagnetism. But I liked to teach from it, and, better, the students loved it. I wish I had a text like this when I fought against old Schiff, centuries ago!
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