Quantum Mechanics (2 Volumes in 1) [Paperback]

Albert Messiah (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0486409244 | ISBN-13: 978-0486409245 | Publication Date: July 6, 1999

Simple enough for students, comprehensive enough to serve as a reference for professionals. Subjects include formalism and its interpretation, an analysis of simple systems, symmetries and invariance, methods of approximation, elements of relativistic quantum mechanics, much more. "Strongly recommended." — American Journal of Physics.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Product Details

• Paperback: 1152 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications (July 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486409244
• ISBN-13: 978-0486409245
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #356,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still suitable as a reference/historical introduction, April 27, 2002

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quantum Mechanics (2 Volumes in 1) (Paperback)

Published in 1958, this book is still used as a reference in graduate classes in quantum mechanics. One property of older books on quantum theory that is missing in more modern treatments is the inclusion of the history behind the subject. A discussion of the historical origins of a physical theory is of great importance in the learning and the appreciation of the subject. The first chapter of the first volume of this work does that very well, for the author gives a detailed discussion of the issues and experiments that were arising in classical physics in the early years of the 20th century that gave birth to quantum theory. This is followed in chapter two by an introduction (with history) to matter waves and the Schroedinger equation. Both of these chapters are very effective in developing the physical intution behind the quantum theory, beset as it is with problems of interpretation and mathematical inconsistencies.

To develop this intuition further, the author discusses one-dimensional quantum systems in the next chapter. His remarks that these kinds of problems serve to develop the student's understanding and he also refers to the fact that several problems can be reduced to ones that resemble the one-dimensional Schroedinger equation. With the advent of exactly solved many-particle systems in one-dimension that were discovered after this book was published, the consideration of one-dimensional problems such as are included in this chapter is of even more importance. Most of the "standard problems" are discussed here, such as the potential step, the square well potential, and the square potential barrier. The author also does not hesitate to discuss the mathematical properties of the one-dimensional Schroedinger equation.

Chapter 4 is an overview of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics. The most interesting (and controversial) part of this chapter is the statistical interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainly relations. The root-mean-square deviations are defined precisely, but the author does not want to take a stand on the consequences that this move can entail, namely that the product of the root-mean-square deviations of position and momentum must be greater than Planck's constant is a statistical statement only. It does not say what could happen in principle to individual measurements of the position and momentum.

The next four chapter discuss both the rigorous mathematical formalism behind quantum mechanics and its physical interpretation. The author's approach is pretty standard, but at times he feels the need to relax mathematical rigor, such as in the treatment of the Dirac delta "function". A proper treatment of this would entail bringing in some heavy guns from functional analysis, and the author is evidently hesitant to do this in a book at this level. His treatment of pure states and mixtures, namely that of quantum statistical mechanics is too short and could be excluded without detracting from the main points in these chapters. A connection with the classical is given via a discussion of Ehrenfest's theorem. Becuase chaos in classical mechanics was not known at the time of writing, the discussion here is now very out of date. Proving a version of Ehrenfest's theorem for such systems has to this date eluded researchers and has prohibited a sound formulation of "quantum chaos". The author does discuss the WKB approximation and shows how it can be used to study tunneling through a potential barrier. Path integral methods, known at the time of writing, but not very popular then, are not considered. And, in this treatment of the tensor product, he does not deal with the issue of entanglement of states, the latter being of enormous importance in current attempts to realize "quantum computation".

The last three chapters of volume 1 cover exact solution methods for the Schroedinger equation, such as the scattering of a central potential, the harmonic oscillator, and Coulomb scattering. Such problems are now dealt with much more efficiently with symbolic computer languages such as Mathematica and Maple. The properties of the special functions that arise in these solutions are easily understood with the use of these packages.

Volume 2 begins with a consideration of angular momentum in qunatum mechanics. The considerations of symmetry and conservation principles in this discussion are very important from a modern standpoint, permeating as they do in high energy physics and the goals of unification. The author does discuss briefly the issue of time reversibility in quantum mechanics. This issue has occupied the minds of hundreds of theorists, in attempting to elucidate the connection between statistical mechanics, with its "arrow of time", and quantum mechanics, which is invariant under time-reversal.

Perturbation methods are discussed extensively in this volume. But here again, from a modern standpoint these methods can be treated best by the use of symbolic programming languages. In addition, since the use of a computer in physics was somewhat limited at the time this book was written, there is no inclusion of numerical methods. Any textbook on quantum mechanics at this level in the 21st century should include a very detailed introduction to numerical methods so as to prepare the student early on to techniques that will be used more and more in the decades ahead. The use of the computer, with dramatically enhanced computational power, will be the tool that will bring about more fundamental discoveries in the quantum realm in this century, particularly in quantum many-body physics and condensed matter.

The last two chapters consider relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Although the discussion is completely out-dated now, because of the current emphasis on functional methods, rather than canonical quantization as is done here, the discussion might be helpful as to gain insight as to why the canonical approach fell into disfavor.

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Handy reference, January 11, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Quantum Mechanics (2 Volumes in 1) (Paperback)

Messiah is one of those books you can't learn QM from - it's simply too dull and nitpicky, and goes into too much detail. But the same features that make it a poor book to study QM out of make it a very useful reference, and as such I heartly give it the 5 stars it deserves.

Messiah covers just about everything an ordinary physicist should know about basic, non-relativistic quantum mechanics, including quite a nice introduction to field quantization and relativistic wave equations. No Berry phase here, but you can find just about any other topic, treated in great detail. No assertment goes unjustified. No stone is left unturned. Messiah also has a good sense of mathematical responsibility, and includes discussions of many questions avoided in other books, e.g., how can the delta function be rigorously defined? It also has a lot of nifty little bonuses no found in other books, such as the bosonic harmonic oscillator, and perturbation expansion using complex integration of Green's function. Very interesting material hard to find elsewhere.

The only major problem I have with this book is that it does not treat identical particles using fock space. This is a personal quibble, though. Messiah's treatment of identical particles using permutation operators is thorough and didactic.

The book includes useful appendices about the definitions and properties of the special functions he uses (spherical harmonics, bessel functions, and the dreaded confluent-hypergeometric-whatever-function no one likes). Other appendices summarize all the information you'll ever need to remember about Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, and another includes a very good refreshment on group theory needed for QM.

This ultra-low-priced heavy-weight all-in-one Dover edition is like a gift from above. I've used and read many other texts - Baym, Sakurai, Shankar, Dirac, Merzbacher (my apologies if I've misspelled his name), Ballentine, Cohen-Tannoudji - but it's Messiah's text I first turn to for a responsible treatment of any subject I feel unsure about. It's almost like that old cliche, "the pages are falling out of my edition ... "

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Thorough Book, December 23, 2003

By 

Akiko Fukada (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quantum Mechanics (2 Volumes in 1) (Paperback)

The book is thorough and covers all the topics in Quantum mechanics.The chapters follow just the way Q.M developed over the years.The reader would find it even more interesting if he/she has some background in Classical Mechanics because Messiah often refers to Hamilton-Jacobi equation, Action and Hamiltonian in general.

The book also develops Bra-Ket algebra in a very easy way, something I have not seen any other book.Messiah's way of treating scattering problems is quite different from that of the others. He doesn't make use of Green's Function but uses the wave-packet approach.

This books gets 3 stars because it's quite verbose. Messiah often gets stuck in explaining things over and over again(therefore the size of the book!). The drawback is that there are few problems per chapter and are quite difficult. This does not help the student gain confidence in the subject. The book assumes you are familiar with Electrodynamics.