Reviews for Group Theory: The Application to Quantum Mechanics

The average rating for Group Theory: The Application to Quantum Mechanics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-04 00:00:00 Terry Davis What a beautiful book! It's derived from a collection of Tomonaga's lectures, and his love of simple statements and clear style really make them flow. I came away from this book understanding much more about field quantization, isospin, and the Thomas theory than I ever had before. Oka's translation is clear and colloquial -- a justified act of love. And as a renowned physicist in his own right, he ensured that the physics was not mangled in translation -- the prose about the physics is clear and correct (at least to my understanding). I don't know if he had to clean up any equations, but I didn't notice any typos in them either. Also, this may be a minor point, but I thought the equation numbering scheme with the subscripts was really helpful. This book is not intended for general audiences; if the reader isn't familiar with Hamiltonians or quantum mechanics he will gain relatively little from it.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-09 00:00:00 Chris Bishop In this book, Dr. Tomonaga teaches not just Spin and Quantum Physics, but also what the physicists were thinking when they developed their theories and ideas (the development of second quantization was one of several examples). It has stories and chapters devoted not just to the electron but also to the proton and neutron, which were a pleasant surprise to read. I did not think I would take this much pleasure reading from this book. I did not quite follow the first two chapters, but for most of the rest of the book, it was hard to put down. Generally, I like books that teaches physics and places them in the context of history mixed with anecdotes about physicists' interactions and personalities.