Customer Reviews

Notes on Quantum Mechanics

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a delightful booklet. It contains the handwritten notes prepared by Fermi for his lectures at Chicago. They are marvellously organized, with all derivations clearly given, together with the motivations and examples. Sometimes you find a note like that: "Comment on the relative cosmological abundance of elements", and you can only imagine what the master would produce. The table of contents of the book is quite usual, and corresponds more or less to a book like Schiff, Merzbacher, etc, with more emphasis on applications. It is one of the best examples of the Fermi mastery of teaching techniques, using simple models, approximations, clever analogies. The book, as one should expect, contains the best derivation of the "Fermi Golden Rule", which is a formula for the rate of transitions in first-order, time-dependent perturbation theory. Fermi used to make miracles with this formula. The essential difference between this book and the usual intro! ductory ones is, of course, Fermi. This means that the problems are treated as they really appear in nature, with no idealizations to make things easier. Fermi could do that as no other physicist, as he was the last universalist: there was a time in which it was not unreasonable to say that he was the best theoretician and the best esperimentalist in activity.A similar set of notes about thermodynamics and statistical physics was offered also by the University of Chicago Press.I wonder if they are still available.

Wonderful text. Cuts through mounds of verbiage of introductory books on Q/M to the essential core. Must be read as a synopsis and guide to the subject. This short book gets one rights into it. The books by Van Der Waarden on Sources of Q/Mechanics and the book by Schrodinger nicely supplement this. The finely sculpted book by Dirac Prin of Q/M is the eternally definitive description. Dirac's Lectures in Q/M tackles quantization which played such an important role in later developments. The mathematics of Quantum Mechanics is classical stuff of usual math syllabus in this area, mainly partial differential equations. It is only later developments that sought general properties of these in abstract algebraic terms.

The book was in excellent condition, although it took a month for its arrival (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). But the delay was a minor problem, and should I need, in the future, to acquire another book from this seller I will do so without hesitation.

I am always surprised of how few physicists are aware of the existence of these handwritten notes. They are easy to read, concise, to the point, and make for both an excellent introduction to Quantum Mechanics and a text of reference. Fermi was notoriously a great teacher, and the fact that these notes are still handwritten and never edited actually add to them, making this a unique text. I still find myself going through it to check this formula or that derivation. When I have first learnt QM, three completely different books were dear to me: Dirac's, Landau's and this one by Fermi. Why would somebody learn the subject from anybody else?

This is perhaps one of the best supplemental materials to follow up with either during, or shortly after one's quantum courses. This is the closest most of us will ever come to taking a course by the genius Fermi himself, and this book is generally inexpensive. If you've read the description, you'll see that this is nothing close to a self-contained text book though, so some familiarity with QM is needed if you are to make the most of these lecture notes.

I don't know which book the previous reviewer was referring to. This is a physics book, by one of the leading physicists of this century.