Customer Reviews

Lectures On Phase Transitions And The Renormalization Group (Frontiers in Physics)

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This book stands clearly to me as the best one on the vast and fascinating subject of phase transitions, critical phenomena and the renormalization group. My other references are Binney et al., Le Bellac and Yeomans. Nigel Goldenfeld's course is the most suitable for a first contact with the field. It stresses in a exceptional way the ideas lying under each concept and has a gift for explaining what's really going on beyond the equations. This can most clearly be seen with his careful discussion of ergodicity and symmetry breaking.
Moreover, this book is remarkable in that it presents various openings on modern issues ; it includes an overview of disordered systems and a rather complete discussion of dynamical critical phenomena.
After reading this book, you'll probably be ready to fully appreciate the typical treaties on critical phenomena, which use more sharp technical tools but which require a good understanding of the associated physics you'll only find so beautifully presented in Nigel Goldenfeld's book.

Nigel Goldenfeld's book, "Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group" is clear, lucid, and very well-written. One of the most challenging things in writing such a book (I won't call it a text; but it serves well for that purpose) is in helping the reader to gain conceptual insight into the subjects, and not to simply to present a series of equations. In this, Dr. Goldenfeld succeeds admirably.

Topics that Goldenfeld discusses (most significantly; the renormalization group concept and critical phenomena) are presented in a very clear and accessible manner. In fact, his book is so useful that I have adopted his reference as my own "standard nomenclature," and have translated my previously-used notation (and also studied in such classic's as Hill's "Statistical Mechanics") to agree with Goldenfeld's.

One of the aspects that I am particularly enjoying is the care with which Goldenfeld builds the underlying logic and arguments as he approaches key points. This is very well-done, and makes this book a solid "go-to" reference in developing a well-grounded understanding of emerging yet very important topics.

As other reader has put, this is not a classic book, in that the main focus is renormalization group, which is certainly a very dynamic field. Nevertheless, the introduction and discusion of other topics I find very good, so time and time I come back to this book to read again about some other topic which is *not* the RG (ergodicity, the Ising model, dynamics...).

"Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group" is a good text, and a wonderful place to learn about the remormalization group in terms of real physical systems many of which can be measured in your basement (as opposed to HEP which, unless your basement happens to include fermilab is out-of-reach). This book is not a classic, not because it is a poor book, but because this is a dynamical area of modern research.