Customer Reviews

Particles and Nuclei: An Introduction to the Physical Concepts

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This book was an eye-opening discovery to me. I was introduced to another book at my American college-- Perkins: "Intro to High Energy Physics". Want a fine reference book for your shelf? Get Perkins. Want to actually *learn* the subject? Get THIS book by Povh et al!

What I like:
- First, it accomplishes an amazing presentation task. The subject area itself is somewhere between graduate level and not-even-solved active research (eg quark theory). Yet it manages a presentation that is readable at the undergraduate level.
- It is a relatively short and punchy presentation. It presents a small number of cases per topic that have the most instructive physics; and within those cases it often focuses on simple, memorable extremes. A lot of thought and refinement must have gone into this! This is great for learning, since I think we humans learn and retain things that are simple and extreme.
- The text is full of teaching and applying *physical intuition*. My MasterCard commercial: "Physics text brimming with formulas: $70. Intuition: Priceless."
- Why I find this book so satisfying: When you got into science in the first place, didn't you have those visceral curiosities, like "just how big is this body compared to that?", or "what is its shape?"? This book addresses that in a satisfying way. In addition to it being thoughtfully illustrated, the text seems to strive to connect measured things, eg Fourier components, back to a tangible description.
- I'm grateful to its teaching me about the nuclear regime. Since sub-nuclear fundamental particles have been the sexy forefront forever, the nucleus doesn't seem to get much airtime. But including it makes a nice story, with analogies that connect the atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear regimes.
- Lastly: It presents experimental data, much of it through reproduced original graphs and data. So this is a book about reality.

In any case, I see tons of care, care, care, and attention to the student.

Back to the comparison with Perkins. I think Perkins is fine, and I've even updated to its 4th edition. But in comparison to what this book (Povh et al) proves can be accomplished, Perkins is more like a technical summary of current results rather than something I would recommend curling up with and enjoying learning everything from.

So to new students: I hope you discover this book. To new course designers: I hope you help your students with great examples of teaching like this!

This is a fairly poorly written and translated book. Perhaps the original work was well written, but something has definately been lost in translation.
The trouble with the book is that it cares too much about experimental details and not enough about seeing the larger theoretical picture. A typical mode of presentation in this book is to show a scattering graph, get excited about resonant peaks, pull obscure equations out of research papers and use it all to conclude that something exists. The book then moves on to the next member of the particle zoo. In principle this is not a problem since we are after all graduate students, but in practice it leads to far too much in the way of pointless trivia that only serves to conceal the bigger picture. A far better treatment would start out with the standard model and the fundamental forces and use the laws and properties described to deduce the various phenomenon seen in elementary particle physics (and then maybe provide experimental details) as opposed to using the phenomenon to construct the model and forces.
Another major issue with the book is that the exercises go all over the place - using equations and graphs from other (not yet studied because they're further along) chapters.
I would not recommend that anyone waste the $60 or so that this book costs unless they're already familiar with the theoretical content and just want an experimentalist overview of the subject.

It arrived to me in Italy 20-15 days before the standard international shipping's time, in perfect conditions, as bought from the bookshop.