Reviews for The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1

The average rating for The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, Vol. 1 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-09 00:00:00 Sallie Mayer Be careful which edition you use: get the revised second edition! I found the first edition in a used bookstore for dirt cheap. (I understand now why the first edition was so cheap: it's riddled with typos.) As I worked through it, I redid every calculation myself (with the book closed, naturally). But I'm a little rusty with some of the math. So when I finished reproducing the calculations, sometimes I got different results. I was flustered, especially with the calculation to get from eq (2.72) describing a 2-particle state in the second quantized nonrelativistic free field to the Schrodinger equation for a two-body system. Turns out, it's a typo in the first edition! The second edition fixed it. Plus the second edition avoided the physically incorrect explanation for delta functions appearing in the potential term. I suppose this will train me to trust my calculations better... But still, it's the only book which actually talks about the functional Schrodinger equation in great detail. So you should read it. Just read the corrected second edition.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-14 00:00:00 Jamie Browning Excellent overview for both topics! I really liked this book. I also recommend for the basic and intermediate topics Lancester's book (Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur book).