Customer Reviews

Quantum Mechanics

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

 

 

According to the back cover, this book should be suitable for those in general chemistry and engineering. Not quite. This book introduces, fairly quickly, advanced topics in mathematics that many chemists or engineers may not be familiar with even at a graduate level. My overall impression of Aber's book is that the reader should already be quite familiar with quantum mechanics, and the ability of being able to extract information from wavefunctions. For instance, understanding basic Hamiltonian dynamics, Lagrangian Mechanics, expectation values, and so forth. However, the real dilemma with understanding the material is that the reader should have a working knowledge of tensor analysis; group theory and its application with SU(n) {SU(3) & SU(2)} and O(n); complex analysis(residue theorem); and variety of integral transforms (gamma functions, Laplace transforms, ect... ). In addition, if the reader has not taken, at least, two semesters of "Mathematical Methods in Physics" courses then Aber's book may seem a little out of reach. THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO LEARN THE MATHEMATICS STATED ABOVE. In no way is this a negative attribute of Aber's presentation, it's just a more advanced presentation of quantum mechanics than other quantum books such as Griffiths or Shankar.

I just finished using this book for a graduate quantum class. I agree with other reviewers: this book is riddled with errors. However, even if the errors were corrected, the writing would still be clunky and boring.
Besides these problems, I feel like there is too little emphasis on physical insight, and the the problems are tedious and do not promote understanding. I feel like I've done a lot of work for a very meager reward. Since this is the first grad quantum book I used, I can't recommend another, but I'm ready to get a new one.

This is a poorly written book. It abounds with errors, and the notation is horribly inconsistent. In my opinion you would be better off using a combination of Griffiths, Sakurai, and Shankar. Abers was the text required for my quantum mechanics class, and I used it as little as was necessary.

Although I mean no ill-will towards the author, who I am sure is a very competent physicist, this is the worst text on quantum mechanics I've ever seen. The fact that it was even published is surprising, and even more surprising it is actually used by any professors for graduate courses. I actually wished I could give this book zero stars.

It claims to be appropriate for many different fields of science, but even graduate students in physics can't understand what the author is talking about. Part of this is because of it's poor presentation of the material, and it certainly doesn't help that it is just so erroneous! On one hand, I may thank the author for posting the official errata on his university website. However, any text that has an 8 page pdf errata probably should not have been published before more careful editing. I am actually convinced this cannot be better than half of the errors in this text, as I'm fairly certain I found even more and just could not be bothered even to submit them to the author. This was mainly because I'd read something that made no sense on basically every page. Of course quantum mechanics is not a trivial subject, but textbook errors and poor explanation only make matters worse.

If you are a professor, please never use this book for your courses. If you are a student, never voluntarily open the cover of this book, and if you do, please be sure to have access to other much better books if you hope to learn anything. At least get Sakurai's book on Modern Quantum Mechanics, even if the latter chapter (the final versions on written by him personally) are somewhat lacking. You could probably do better in a graduate course with Griffiths's text alone than with the assistance of this book, which as anyone whose used Griffiths's Quantum text will know, is saying quite a lot!

It is a well-written graduate level quantum mechanics book. The material is comprehensive and more systematical, compared with Sakurai's, especially in latter chapters of the book, like time-dependent perturbation theory and its application to scattering theory. And the physics explanation is accomanied with mathmatical rigor in these topics, unlike some other books I read before. There are also some mordern topics like nutrino oscillation, EPR paradox, well-explained in quantum-mechanics level.

The cons is that the errors are too many scattered in every chapter, though most of them are only typos. Since there is long list of corrections in Aber's website, make sure you check it before reading every chapter.

Abers' book is quite unlike most of the other QM books that I've run across. The Author assumes a sound knowledge of grad Mechanics and uses ideas from Mechanics throughout the book.
Abers dispenses with the obligatory 'why we need to know QM' chapters, stating that QM has been around long enough and is well-established enough that such a justification is unnecessary at this level. No time is spent on the old QM either (a very good thing, since the old QM is very arbitrary). Instead Abers reviews the major ideas of Mechanics in the first chapter and spends the second chapter setting up the formalism of wave-mechanics. No actual quantization is encountered until the third chapter.
The book excels at presenting the mathematical aspects of the theory in a manner suitable for a physics course. People have complained that the formalism used in the book is somewhat inconsistent, but in my opinion, it is always easy to understand what Abers is trying to say if one does not get overly hung up on the formalism. In any case, the inconsistencies are nowhere near as glaring as one might suppose. While there are a few misprints, there are nowhere near as many as would become detracting. Don't forget that this is the first edition, so I'm pretty sure that the next printing of the book will have fixed all the known errors.
This book is an excellent text for a two-three semester graduate level QM course. No reference texts are necessary (unlike say Jackson's book, for which an undergrad EM text as well as Arfken's book are almost mandatory). I'm really glad our professor picked this book for our course.

This book is everything that a graduate level quantum mechanics book should be. It starts with a thorough review of the basics you've seen in undergraduate and works all the way through to introductory field theory. In this sense, it is also a particularly useful book to read if you aspire to study theoretical particle physics. Let me just say that I don't aspire to this, and I still learned a lot from it.

Though it is an upper-level undergraduate physics text/low-level graduate physics text, it's readability and usability would be greatly improved were the author to keep consistent notation. I don't really understand how a quantum mechanics book that can pass for a graduate level text doesn't have a Clebsch-Gordan table in it, but overall it's pretty user-friendly otherwise.