Customer Reviews

Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals: Emended Edition (Dover Books on Physics)

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It is a gospel for all physics students that this masterpiece is finally available as a Dover edition. Written by Feynman himself, this book explains the path integral approach to quantum mechanics in a way that is understandable to every beginning quantum mechanic. Path integrals are integral (sorry, bad English) to the study of quantum field theory and string theory, and you must be a master at it if you would like to work in either of these fields. Purchase this book at once and start working!

The Feynman Lectures deserve their status as classics, bringing novel insights and clarity even to topics that one would think ancient and musty (e.g. his exposition of radio waves). I'm not sure I would recommend them as undergraduate texts, since there may be too much wizardry where the solutions depend on deep insights or unexpected symmetries, with perhaps too few examples of brute calculation and no exercises to be worked by the student. However, they are unsurpassed when used to supplement the usual treatments or just to appreciate the beauty of the subject. For some reason, I never had the same feeling toward Volume III (Quantum Mechanics). In part, I think this is because he was trying too hard to reconcile the usual Schroedinger description with his own version of Quantum Mechanics, namely the least action/ path integral approach used in this text. Without the same constraint here (although he does very elegantly derive the wave equation from the least action principle), I experienced the same sense of wonder and awe that I felt from his earlier treatment of mechanics and electricity/magnetism. Although it's only my personal opinion, I would recommend this as the true successor to volumes I and II of the Lectures.

It is wonderful to see this extraordinary work back in print, especially in this attractive low cost Dover edition. As an added bonus, the myriad misprints that plagued the original 1965 printing (and caused me such grief when I first read it in high school) have been corrected.

The path integral approach, so clearly explained in this volume, derived from Feynman's graduate research at Princeton where he applied variational principles to quantum mechanics. This, in turn, was motivated by a seminal 1932 paper of Dirac.

At the time, the formalism appeared to provide only an elegant means of deriving the wave equation without achieving any new results. But elegant mathematics always seems to have a way of finding application in physics. Just look at how formerly "obscure" topics like Lie algebras and differential geometry have become part of the essential language of particle physics. And path integral methods have proved useful in fields ranging from quantum electrodynamics to acoustic propagation.

Like all of Feynman's works, this text combines sound, if unconventional, mathematics with remarkable physical insight. There is still no better introduction to the topics treated here. This book is required reading for anyone wishing to understand quantum mechanics (at least in so far as anyone can understand quantum mechanics) and who intends to pursue more advanced topics.

Heartily recommended!

Despite the difficult nature of the subject, this is a wonderful read for anyone interested in Quantum Mechanics. Feyman's brilliance as a physicist and his ability to convey understanding to those of us less gifted are equally matched in this book.

This book hardly needs a review. An excellent book on an extremely important topic-path integral.
Although there are a few new books on the topic available, this book is unique in the sense it
was written by its founding father. The treatment on influence functional and its relation to stochastic
process is simply fantastic.

This book is the outgrowth of a class Richard Feynman taught to undergraduates. It is designed to present an alternative approach to looking at and understanding quantum mechanics from the usual first approach taught to undergraduates, namely focussing on solving the Schrodinger equation. As such it presupposes some familiarity already at the undergraduate level with both classical and quantum mechanics and the associated mathematical necessities. If you have this background, I think you will find this book to be a very interesting read. If you don't, you'll probably quickly become frustrated, since it makes no pretensions about being comprehensive or complete. It presents a point of view which as the author points out in the Preface is complementary (no pun intended) to other ways of understanding quantum mechanics. Some aspects of QM are more easily understood using this approach, others are not. As Feynman once said, any theoretical physicist worth her salt will have at her disposal several different ways of approaching a problem, and will select the one that is most useful for each problem. The path integral approach is just one arrow in the quiver, albeit a very important one.

In the early 1940s Richard Feynman was presented with a comment made by an older physicist P.A.M. Dirac. In response to that comment Feynman asked, "What is the use of that?" Feynman answered his own question in a way that ultimately led to him being universally considered as the greatest physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals expands on that answer he gave and discusses the core of his work leading ultimately to his Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. This book is a classic that could only be written by the master himself. So what is the use of this book? It introduces the reader to a substantial portion of modern physics.

As I could see this new version of the Feynman's book is well written and some of the mistakes of the old version were corrected. I recommend it for people whom are physics lovers and undergraduate students as a good introduction to the subject.

Feynman more or less pioneered quantum mechanics performed with path integrals. The book however is no easy reading or browsing for quick referral. In my opinion the style is somewhat outdated too. And furthermore it requires top level mathematical knowledge to have ready in your mind already, to be able to understand it. Nothing for beginners here... To conclude, it is OK to have but only as an extra, because it comes from the master himself.

This is a classic on path integrals by one of the founders of the subject, finally in Dover edition.