Customer Reviews

A Modern Course in Statistical Physics

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

 

 

I found this book to be clumsy in its notation and sloppy in its delivery. The information presented in the book is more than comprehensive, however. Each chapter ends with a "special topics" section that covers new and old ideas in the field. Yet the book manages to fall short with its organization and presentation. When new concepts are introduced, very little background is given, and steps in calculations are often bypassed. There are many examples to follow, but even the examples seem pointless when the next step in the derivation has been skipped and it takes the reader several minutes to find the connection. In addition, the book is a somewhat poor reference in the way that many chapters cannot stand alone, due to the quirky notation that is scattered all over the book. If one is not familiar with this notation, then if one wishes to reference the book, he or she will have to waste time finding out why the author uses a capital N there and a small n here, a "mu prime" there and a "mu" here, or a vector k there and an apparently scalar k here.

In summary, the book is comprehensive, covering a wide range of ideas both new and old, but it fails in the fact that it cannot present the information in a clear manner.

I'm glad that there's "eventually" a stat-mech textbook that takes from grads' points of view. It starts from a undergrad level of thermodyanmics and ends to somewhere close to renormalization group. It's a book with clear examples, figures, and explicit derivation of equations for average grad students rather than particular flock of "genius". I gave it two thumbs up.

I own the first edition of this book, which I enjoyed thoroughly. Clearly written, it steers a course between introductory and advanced. Whether an owner of the first edition should also buy the second edition, may be doubted, as is clear from the 1 star comment below, but a physics student looking for a good "more advanced" book after having followed an introductory university course, would certainly appreciate this second edition, which is a stepping stone between the basic intro books and the specialized monographies on e.g. phase transitions or hydrodynamics. I have given 5 stars to compensate maximally for the 1 star review below, which does not do justice to the book.

if you don't have enough energy to bite through from the beginning, stay away from this book. The key physics is largely buried under the (unnecessarily) heavy notations and equations.

However, it may be a good source for reference.

This is not a book for total beginners, but those with a good math background and at least a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics should be able to bring their knowledge to a very high level by diligently studying Reichl's text.

The book starts out with a couple of chapters on "non-statistical" thermodynamics and a few chapters on probability and stochastic processes; this provides a firm foundation for the equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to which the latter two-thirds of the book is devoted. Throughout the book the explanations and derivations are very clear, and the inclusion of worked sample problems is a definite plus. Highly recommended for any grad student (or advanced undergrad) in physics, materials science, etc.

I'm glad that there's "eventually" a stat-mech textbook that takes from grads' points of view. It starts from a undergrad level of thermodynamics and ends to somewhere close to renormalization group. It's a book with clear examples, figures, and explicit derivation of equations for average grad students rather than particular flock of "genius". I gave it two thumbs up.

This book does cover a range of topics with an emphasis more relevant to current and recent physical research than many other texts, and is generally well presented and explained. I turn to it along with Reif's Statistical Mechanics as standard references. I particularly liked the extensive discussion of probability theory and stochastic processes and their relevance to physics in Chapters 5 and 6. But this discussion is somewhat flawed in its mathematical details, particularly in connection with Markov chains. Actually this reflected my experience with the book as a whole -- a great collection of topics explained well in general, but not always when read in detail.

I used this textbook for a Graduate Statistical Mechanics course at Rutgers University.

The Bad
- terrible to learn concepts from for the first time. Makes almost no attempt to help develop intuitive feel for the concepts at hand. Problems and equations are presented with very little motivation or connection to the subject as whole. Derivations show sparse amount of steps, but with little explanation of how to get from one point to the other.
- Typos?? This book has a surprising amount of errors in it, most problematically in the equations themselves.

The good
- Covers ALOT of material that the others (Pathria, Reif) don't get near such as Renormalization Groups and pretty much every single Special Topics sections at the end of the chapters. Although I found very little use for this textbook while taking the course (Landau & Pathria were the main books I looked to) I am glad to have it for my bookshelf since it seems to offer a lot of interesting reference on the more advanced subjects.

Firstly, let me begin by saying that the 2nd edition of this book is much better than the current one. Even the 2nd edition has many of the flaws shared by this one but it's a lot more comprehensive and clear. And there are several sections in that book which are not covered at all/in minimal detail in this edition, the 3rd one.

Now, there are some good features in this book. In particular, this book has a pretty solid discussion of thermodynamics. This may not be a very "exciting" or "new" topic but quite a useful one especially in biological and chemical systems. And then, the section on Brownian motion and Fluctuation-Dissipation is one of the better ones to be found in an introductory graduate text. The same goes for the discussion of transport theory, which was slightly better in the 2nd edition.

The flaws are mainly two-fold. The first is the matter of an extremely confusing notation where the same symbols are repeated for very different physical quantities or sometimes the notation used is unnecessarily complex. The second problem lies in the fact that the core of introductory stats mechanics: the canonical and grand canonical ensemble are not covered in good enough detail. The non-equilibrium phase transitions are also not given the level of importance that they deserve.

I'd probably have given 4 stars for the second edition and 3.5 for the third one. It is a good book for some topics but beware of the notation and the rather high number of incomplete derivations.

I own this book and I think it is a very good introduction to intermediate level
in statistical mechanics.