Customer Reviews

Modern Physics

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I really wanted to use this book to teach my Modern Physics class this semester. But the fact that whole sections are omitted from the text and placed online ruined the book. Figure numbers jump in sequence, references are made to equations that are not in the text, and the whole experience of sitting down with a book to learn is defeated.

I don't know why the authors or publishers insisted on doing this this way. I would have adoped the book if they hadn't.

This book's explanations vary from poor to excellent. The derivations, while they are given, are not well done. They often skip steps that leaving the reader wondering just how they got from point A to point B. The answers in the back of the book and in the instructor's solutions manual are also often incorrect. The publisher of this book also elected to put large sections of this book online instead of in the book. An entire chapter, the astrophysics section, is online, which is absolutely ludicrous for such an expensive book. Overall, this book just doesn't cut it.

This solution manual only shows a solution to every other odd problem... which is insufficient. When I need help on a problem, there is not usually anything even close to what I am trying to do in the examples, or the solution manual. (unless its one of the solved problems, which only occurs 1 out of 5 times.)

I think I am one of the few reviewers to give this book a middle of the road rating. At first I really hated the book, it was difficult to read, and the illustrations were monotone and sometimes superfluous. But what really bugged me, and this is still my number one complaint, the derivation of equations is done in a very haphazard manner, it is very difficult to see where the authors were getting fundamental equations and how they were applying them to create specific expressions. Sometimes it would take me a good five minutes working and thinking very hard just to understand how the authors took a step in the derivation of an equation. While it believe such thinking is beneficial when doing homework, it is very hard to follow when trying to learn a subject. Many times, with their piecemeal derivations, I even felt like the authors were just waving their hands and saying "you don't need to know where this equation comes from, just how to apply it." I think perhaps such a mentality is better left to an introductory course, but it has no place in a course which only physics majors would likely be taking.

The book, even with its failings, is not bad, I particularly like the history and background the authors give, I did not think it was obtrusive and I think it helped to put a lot of stuff into context. The problem sets at the end are very good, and I only found a single mistake in the selected answers, which my professor was kind enough to confirm. The online "extra" section was superb. And the quantum mechanics section was very clear without being mathematically obtuse. Though, a more rigorous derivation of some equations would be beneficial.

I gave the book 3 stars because overall it was good; however, like I said, the derivations are pretty poor and I also fear the binding will not stand up to a lifetime of use and reference, the paper quality is also not very good.

TERRIBLE book! I have no respect for the authors. Even in 3rd edition, there is a mistake on about every other page and some of the formulas are even printed wrong! They keep a known error page on the web (bad) but there are many more (even worse).
The book is incredibly difficult to use because there are very few examples and of the few examples many steps are dropped and does not explain clearly where the formulas came from. As for the problems in the book, besides the fact that the answers in the back are often wrong, the authors often require formulas not mentioned in that particular section and sometimes not even in the chapter or the book itself! As for the text of the book, every chapter includes too much chatter on the background of the discovery and not enough words explaining the concepts themselves.
The worst book I have used and several students agree. Physics is hard but these guys make it harder. My advice: get a book from a good publisher with authors from good universities.

For the purpose the book is written, it is very badly edited.
There is too much unnecessary text, and the fact that a lot of the book is in the form of online PDF's doesn't help either.

Book is poorly written, explainations are sometimes hard to follow, organization is poor, and overall i had to read sections more than once just to understand it.

i would recommend Kenneth Krane's Modern Physics over this, which i tried reading afterwards. it may have sometimes hard to follow organization, but the explainations, the equations, and the overall structure of this book is much better than this book.


Reviewer: good physics student who usually learns from the book more than the actual teacher, but in the case of this book, i needed the teacher. however, during the summer i read the end half of the aforementioned krane's book and i could pick up the physics much more easily (without a teacher even).

We used this as the primary text for my UG Modern Physics II class, which essentially covered special/general relativity and particle physics. I agree with other reviewers that it is highly annoying that the authors will place whole chunks of text on the website, and expect the students to look it up there rather than in the book, where it should be. I understand that undergraduate physics students will not understand everything about quantum mechanics and the underlying principles of particle physics, but this text definitely makes the material too easy and leaves out almost all the math at times. Explanations are often trivial and not understandable. This is precisely what a physics textbook should not be, and as such I recommend looking elsewhere for a modern physics text.

Modern Physics is a funny concept. What Physicists consider to be modern consists of discoveries that in some instances happened just over a century ago. In this view what makes these topics and discoveries modern is not their relative age, but rather the conceptual shift from the Physics that has dominated the scientific worldview since at least the time of Galileo. Even more importantly, this "old" scientific worldview is based on "common sense" notions about the space, time and matter that everyone has taken for granted ever since people started to think about these concepts. In that regard the implications of modern physics go far beyond anything that had been discovered up to that point, and take a long time to wrap our minds around. Because the modern physics is has such a deep and revolutionizing impact on the way that we think about the world, and because it is comprised of the scientific discoveries of the greatest minds that ever lived, it is illusory to expect that a single semester course would do justice to all of its complexity. This textbook, like most others for this subject, has to work with these daunting constraints. When that is taken into consideration, one can't but conclude that the textbook is on par with similar other ones in this category. It certainly has its shortcomings, but overall this is as good of a book as any to gain make first steps in direction of understanding the modern Physics.

Because of the way that the concepts form modern Physics run counter to our intuition, it takes a while to get used to them. Physics is not just an agglomeration of equations and mathematical formulas designed to be applied to some data. It is also a collection of stories and mental pictures that have been developed in order to make a better sense of the meaning of the world around us. These stories are especially useful and needed when we encounter new physical theories for the first time. From that point, this textbook is a wonderful resource. It provides many interesting and insightful stories that accompany our understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena.

What this book is not very good at is the derivation of equations and formulae. Oftentimes the reader is left in the dark, and additional work on one's own may be required. This is particularly frustrating when it comes to some more complicated equations or results, like the "derivation" of Lorentz transformations or the Rutherford scattering formula. Granted, most of these derivations are better handled in an advanced Physics course where they can be given more careful treatment, but nonetheless one feels that they are not given as good of a treatment at this level as possible.

To conclude, this is a decent book on one of the most amazing topics in science. It is best to take it as an introduction to the field, rather than a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment. With those caveats, it is possible to gain a decent understanding of what the modern Physics is all about from this textbook.

After reading this book, and using the first half of it in conjunction with an introduction to relativity and QM course, I question the authors' motivation for writing it.

The book is split into two parts, part I: relativity an QM, and part II: applications.

Part I:
The first half of the book probably would have gotten a four star rating from me. There are relevant example problems presented, and although the descriptions and derivations of equation sometimes do take a lot of work to decipher, this is to be expected of a physics text. Illustrations are often provided, commonly in the form of graphs illustrating results from experiments and agreement with predictions. The authors go through a bit of trouble to explain a lot of the experiments that were used to test whichever concept is being studied, which can be a good method of learning. Example problems are good, and although many solutions are omitted, they exist in the student manual.

Part II:
The application part of the book is what really makes this book only just meh. The author tries to cover huge areas of subject matter in a very short space. Many of these chapters are much better suited to entire texts, and indeed, if you wish to learn about them that is the route I suggest. In describing the standard model, nuclear physics, and astrophysics, Tipler includes almost no derivations and presents all equations (few) without proof. Sometimes a hand-waving argument is made, but these chapters are extremely unsatisfying. They read much more like a popular science paperback then an undergraduate physics textbook. In my opinion, Tipler should have omitted select chapters and focused attention into rigorously developing a few areas of application, rather than merely describing all the ones he could think of. The included section on astrophysics, in particular, uses almost none of the relativity and quantum mechanics of the past five hundred pages, and amounts to a merely descriptive anecdote of the universe.

With more focus, Tipler could have made this a good text, but as it stands, it is only just OK.