Customer Reviews

Primer of Quantum Mechanics

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

What a wonderful gem of a book this is! It is written with grace and eloquence and yes with a bit of passion for the subject as well! It probably cannot be used as a stand alone textbook since it lacks the rigour and depth of standard textbooks. However, it is a perfect adjunct to any QM class. The book uses the Dirac notation from the beginning, much like the books by Townsend, Shankar and Sakurai (a couple of these are graduate level books). As such it will not follow the typical undergraduate's class experience if books such as Griffins are used. As with most books the problems are an integral part of the book and of your education. For the most part these are not untractable and hints and solutions are given for some.
If you are planning on taking QM in the fall then you have enough mathematics to tackle this on your own (perhaps the summer prior to the first QM class). And if one puts the effort much can be gained from this little book. Also, since Dover is the publisher the price is not unreasonable.

A good and relatively easy introduction to Dirac notation for quantum mechanics. Very suitable for self study--I have worked through all of it, including all the problems. Most of the problems are an integral part of the text, but there are solutions to many and hints for many of the others. Should be suitable also for an undergraduate text in quantum mechanics. As an example of his method, Chester treats EPR in a general and apparently original manner, i.e. he uses neither the formulation in the EPR paper nor Bohm's--in most treatments the latter is most common (and certainly easiest to apply to experimental tests). I found the chapter on indistinguishable particles particularly helpful. Using simple examples, the author provides a clear introduction to the topic. Somewhat weak in the area of matrix mechanics; using Dirac notation in that section seems forced. There is a number of typographical errors, which are not serious however.

The author has an original way with words that makes for interesting reading. Many paragraph headings make memorable slogans, such as "WHAT YOU MEASURE IS WHAT YOU KNOW".

But in order to understand this book you must come to terms with the author's own terminology; for instance he regularly uses the word "language" to mean a mathematical "basis".

Dirac notation is used liberally, and the Dirac bracket is explained in words in several different ways; but nowhere is it defined in mathematical terms, as the inner product (scalar product) of two vectors. This seems surprising in view of the author's statment that "The entire business of practical quantum mechanics is devoted to obtaining transformation matrices!". The elements of transformation matrices are Dirac brackets, but this book shows how in many cases they can be evaluated without knowing their mathematical definition.

This book has a strongly practical approach, with emphasis on the physical apparatus used to make physical measurements.

This superb book will help you actually understand the Dirac notation and vector formalism.

You need a good practical knowledge of Fourier analysis and some comfort with complex numbers.

A truly superb introduction to the non-schrodinger formalism.

I am now very happy to discover that this book is now again in print! This is a book I would have liked very much if it was available some 14 years ago when I was an undergraduate student. We should be in a time when old presentations of the subject were abandoned. The book,in an intelligent spirit of a primer, introduces Dirac's notation which, in my opinion, is the only chance that a non-genius has to really understand some Quantum Physics. We must remember that Dirac's notation may be some 70 years old, and that Feynman, himself, wrote his third volume of the "Lectures" some fourty years ago, trying to put the bras and kets in an introductory approach.

This book approaches Quantum Mechanics in a non-standard and refreshing way. It starts with <bra|ket> notation immediately! It builds the subject in a conceptual fashion, and so is an excellent complement to a standard course text, which will develop the topic in a historical progression.

I asked the physicist Sean Carroll (CalTech) to recommend a book that was an intermediate between the popular science books and a full-out text book, and he told me to get this one, and it was most certainly worth the money. You do need to know calculus and imaginary numbers, like the book says, but I also think it would be useful to have a basic understanding of the mathematical computation that is used (which Dirac started in his book "Principles of Quantum Mechanics").

This book contains mathematical and verbal explanations, and at the end of each chapter is a set of problems for you to work through, making sure you understand the material.

I highly recommend this book.

The author relates the Dirac notation to the concepts very well. Explanations are also very clear and concise. Conventions for the Dirac notation is also explained very well. I'd say its an excellent self study book too, as long as the reader has sufficient math and physics background. At this size and weight, its extremely portable and easy to carry around for anytime reading =) Font and size of chracters makes this book easy to read, while not making it look like a nursery rhyme book. Diagrams are very helpful and quite abundant.

"Primer of Quantum Mechanics" by Marvin Chester allows the reader to
organize his thinking and basic knowledge of Quantum Mechanics. It does
assume a fair amount of mathematics: matrices, calculus and vectors. It
also focuses on the content and foundations of the science and so will be
useful to those just wanting an overview. It tends to be somewhat dated but as a basic guide it does not suffer.

No doubt you can learn a lot of basic QM from this book, and its answers and hints to problems are good for self-study. But the author (MC) is overly insistent on his particular philosophical interpretation of the subject. Ubiquitous bold-face headers in capitals give the book the feeling of an indoctrination manual for a New Age cult: e.g., "WHAT YOU MEASURE IS WHAT YOU KNOW" (@13), "THERE'S ALWAYS A LANGUAGE OF CERTAINTY" (@195) and "THE WHOLE UNIVERSE PARTAKES IN EVERY EVENT" (@240). (I share another reviewer's irritation at the use of "language" for "basis", BTW.) It recalls the 1970s and early '80s, when John Archibald Wheeler was pushing his observers-create-the-universe POV and Wu-Li Masters were Dancing. The main text has more than its share of moralizing, or at least odd, judgments, such as that uncertainty is caused by "[p]igheaded insistence on measuring other observables" (@195) -- so the same wouldn't be true of inadvertent, or simply unenthusiastic, measurement of another observable?

MC adopts the Schrödinger picture ("A STATE EVOLVES IN TIME", @ 177) without alerting the reader, presumably a QM novice, that he's doing so; a corollary is that he also fails to mention the Heisenberg picture (all time dependence in dynamical variables, none in the states). Moreover, a cornerstone of MC's view is interpreting the wave function as describing an individual particle. Unfortunately, this is neither the only interpretation of QM (though you won't learn that from this book), nor the best one. If you're willing to dive into its Dirac-ish, math-intensive approach, Leslie Ballentine's terrific text gives you a much more through and balanced analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of QM, including a careful and convincing argument for a statistical interpretation of the uncertainty relations (an aspect of QM that Einstein got right). As Ballentine's book also shows, if you're going to be opinionated it's more helpful to the reader if you at least describe other views before you trash them. Ironically for a book with a strong experimentalist orientation, this "Primer"'s math might be more reliable than its physics. If you read it, work the problems and be skeptical about most of the rest.