Customer Reviews

Nuclear and Particle Physics

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

 

 

As a 4th year undergraduate physics student, I used Williams' book in my introductory nuclear physics course. I found the style and layout of the book to be extremely difficult to follow. Though I am very interested in the subject matter, I was very hard-pressed to make reasonable progress while reading Williams. Too often, information is placed in awkward "boxes", or is inadequately introduced. To make things worse, the book is rife with errors in grammar and spelling, not to mention awkward phrasing. In section 8.10, Willams chooses a script J to represent a moment of inertia and an I for angular momentum--contrary to convention--seemingly, in an attempt to confuse the student!

Not happy with this book. The man knows his physics, but his use of the English language needs a good make-over. Sentences too long, very few commas, and muddled grammar. Many proof-reading errors. Problems are too hard for beginners, being excerpts from Honours exams - which students are tested on at the END of the course, not while they are still learning. No examples, no solutions and no colour. Other books are worse, though. The definitive Nuclear Physics textbook is yet to be written. Surely there must be a professor somewhere who knows his stuff, is a half-decent writer and has some idea of style and composition.

The main problem with this book is that it gives no worked examples. It also gives problems that require a knowledge of material only covered in later chapters of the book. All in all there are probably better books available from the students perspective.

It is a very nice, pedagogical textbooc at an intermediate level. I found the explanations clear and detailed to a desired degree. I covers all the basic topic and I am going to consult it when teaching a Nuclear Physics class at undergraduate level.
As a university professor I find it to be one of the top ten books on the subject.

This is currently the best undergraduate textbook covering simultaneously nuclear and particle physics. The particle physics is better laid out, though, than nuclear physics, more comprehensively and making a better use of intuition, most likely reflecting the author's background. Overall, the book makes a good use of the capabilities of an undergraduate while not avoiding serious issues. Some exercises can be challenging. The danger in the topic, at this level, that the book successfully avoids, is in just providing information and not engaging the student.

From the reviews that I see here and elsewhere, it seems that whenever you have a book commonly used in teaching, you will find some accumulation of damming reviews by disgruntled students upset that they have to learn the stuff, taking it out on the book.

This book covers a large amount of material, but offers very few examples and is hard to follow for the more challenging topics.