Customer Reviews

Quantum Physics, Third Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

This is the worst introductory book on quantum mechanics that I have ever seen in my life. It is simply awful. This is the kind of book which professors seem to love and students will hate. Why? Because a professor has gone through the subject (presumably) several times and will look at the book and see all the goodies in it and think that it is great. Gasiorowicz does treat several interesting topics, mostly in later chapters. However, for the student, Gasiorowicz in my opinion completely fails to explain the subject of quantum mechanics even in the most basic way. He presents topic after topic, but unfortunatley is far to inept to tie anything together. There is no "glue" which is what the inexperienced learner needs to survive. He (Gasiorowicz) fails to let the reader know that the abstract concepts that he is presenting are anything but that. He simply blasts the reader away, assuming that he or she already knows basically what he's talking about. This brings me back to what I said before about professors liking this book. For someone with familiarity to the subject it is good, for those without it is painfully bad.

Assigning this book for an introductory course in QM is like the high school teacher who forces his students to read Faulkner. William Faulkner is one of the greatest writers in recent American history, but one needs a strong foundation in read literature to read him, understand him, and finally find the beauty in his writing. Quantum Mechanics is like that. There are three steps to "understanding," being able to read it, grasp it, and finally understand and find beauty in it. Gasiorowicz tries to come in on the third step, ignoring any Pedagogy whatsoever. One cannot just step into quantum physics and immediately find beauty in it. It requires patience and good explanations and this books in my opinion, fails worse than any book that I have ever seen on any level. Like I said, for someone who understands the subject, well it's good. It's clear and concise. But for filling in the gaps for a lowly undergrad, it is simply horrid. This is certainly not a mf of a book.

I Have read both Liboff, Griffiths, mcGervey and a few others and I have still not found as bad a book for introducing quantum. Besides the number of typos, the author skips mathematical steps like crazy without giving the slightest reason. In addition he just sites principles which you will not know the slightest bit about from reading this book. Most students in my class appear to have turned to Liboff at this point in time and I do not know of a single admirer of Gasiorowicz in my class, AND the semester is almost over!!!
I suggest a combination Liboff for a rough idea of quantum and then Griffiths for an excellent and beautiful grasp of the concepts (introductory level of course.)

P.S. - You just have to get over Griffiths placing the Schrodinger equation on the first page and then you're off.

I disagree with others that this is a poor text. I have noticed that this book tends to be used at the powerhouse universities in physics. It has been a text at Princeton, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Illinois, Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Colorado,UCSD, and UCSB. This is a pretty respectable rouster of the top physics schools.I think this list contains 7 of the top 10 with the other 3 schools using either a harder book yet (Stanford = Cohen Tannoudji) or a

book written at their school. (Cornell = Liboff, Liboff is at Cornell). Caltech uses Liboff too, but in a Freshman course. The junior course at Caltech, phys98, uses Merzbacher and Cohen-Tannoudji. I think the reason that it is used is that it is succinct and covers alot of ground. It is an undergraduate equivalent to the famous book by Schiff, a book that the best students will like because of its efficiency and elegance, but one that will be frustrating for students who are not well prepared, it is demanding, it requires you to be able to fill in some steps. I find the problem sets are quite good, and drag you through a lot of situations. I find that filling in the gaps in his calculations isnt overly difficult and is helpful. I really like all the applications in the second part of the book. It is true that Gasiorowicz expects you to be able to transfer information from examples that are not the same as the problems in the problem sets, there are no plug and chug problems of the type found in undergrad engineering books, Gasiorowicz assumes this is not needed. Think of this as training to wean you from such crutches, believe me, if you think Gasiorowicz is demanding, JD Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, the near universal text for grad physics E&M, will crush you.

We used the first edition for both semesters of my undergrad course (it's always possible screw up a book in later editions, I suppose). We went through most of the book with our instructor page by page. This is not a chatty book. It is a very tightly written with no fat. You'll need to work through the book with pencil and paper as if you were doing a problem set. So I wouldn't suggest it for a first read, but it's a great book to have for review as there is no extraneous crap.

This is a complete and comprehensive review of Quantum Mechanics. Unfortunately, the text is best suited for someone with previous knowledge of the field and superior skills in mathematics of physics at a higher level than the book is actually used in (Upper-Division Undergraduate Physics). The book lacks cohesiveness required to tackle an abstract subject like quantum mechanics and skips many steps which are non trivial to the untrained reader. The book has essentailly no examples. It is good book for someone who has already done the subject but has forgotten it and wishes to relearn some of the concepts but is very confusing and shocking as a first book in this subject.

People seem to expect a lot from an introductory book. However, this is seldomly seen in introductory textbooks. This book does give a solid introduction to quantum mechanics. Although it presents some of the topics poorly at times (especially the chapters after and including the one on abstract representation of states), it does cover them in a rather readible manner. A good thing about the book is that the author is not verbose. He quickly gets to the point, which can be seen from the short chapters of the book. It's not mathematically rigorous, however, it does expect the student to be comfortable with linear algebra. For mathematical rigor, I recommend Landau. Another recommended book is the one by Shankar.

There is one and only one thing wrong with this book - it does not teach QM conceptually by building on Mechanics. Instead it just states stuff, giving no reason for why things are done as they are. Overall, this book is terrible - bad for undergrads who will learn little, and horrible for grads who won't learn principles. The sooner this book goes out of print, the better.

Granted, there are some good points to the text. I am particularly fond of the way that the first couple chapters' problems cut straight to testing understanding of concepts rather than repetition of techniques.

However, having dealt with this text, I cannot in good conscience recommend it, and in fact disrecommend it. As a textbook, its primary virtue is the fact that it is quite compact and lightweight as far as physics textbooks go.

It does have a secondary virtue; it is a challenging textbook. Surviving a course using the problems within Gasiorowicz entails learning quantum mechanics - often by consulting secondary sources, granted, but the material is learned.

There is absolutely no excuse for a reviewed and widely used textbook to - especially past its first edition - contain this many typos, accidental errors, and notational inconsistencies. The explanations are poor and often lacking critical details. The indexing is particularly bad compared to most other recent editions of physics textbooks, making it difficult to work with as a general reference.

If the text were at least fully proofread and copyedited, I would grudgingly give it three stars as a useful "tough love" textbook even with the explanations that most students find highly cryptic. As is, though, it seems clear that the textbook is not cleverly and carefully designed to frighten students into learning material very well, but simply poorly written.

This book is very confusingly put together, and I would not recommend it to a first-time student. Some chapters seem out of order, each chapter usually includes a very difficult end-of-chapter calculational example. The strict Dirac notation is not adhered to. The author throws in some advanced terminology without explaining it. I think it is a great additional resource for teachers or students wanting additional problems or review. Some explanations, however, are wrong--like the explanation of half-integer spin sign change on p. 244 of the 2nd ed. The 3rd ed. is seemingly crippled by references to the publisher's web site, to keep the book "thin" (and hence attractive to some eclectic group of quantum mechanics teachers that no one has met). Instead of this gutting, future editions of this book could use a coauthor to make it more reasonable and sensible.

This book is so bad I ended up hating the book and the course. I was really looking foward to the start of the semester. This book made me look forward to finals.
Inadequate explanations is what kills this text. I think Mr. Gasiorowicz forgot the text was ment for undergraduate students. Its guaranteed to leave anyone in a total state of consternation.