Book Description
Famous the world over for the creative brilliance of his insights into the physical world, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the nonscientist. QED--the edited version of four lectures on quantum electrodynamics that Feynman gave to the general public at UCLA as part of the Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lecture series--is perhaps the best example of his ability to communicate both the substance and the spirit of science to the layperson.
The focus, as the title suggests, is quantum electrodynamics (QED), the part of the quantum theory of fields that describes the interactions of the quanta of the electromagnetic field-light, X rays, gamma rays--with matter and those of charged particles with one another. By extending the formalism developed by Dirac in 1933, which related quantum and classical descriptions of the motion of particles, Feynman revolutionized the quantum mechanical understanding of the nature of particles and waves. And, by incorporating his own readily visualizable formulation of quantum mechanics, Feynman created a diagrammatic version of QED that made calculations much simpler and also provided visual insights into the mechanisms of quantum electrodynamic processes.
In this book, using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman successfully provides a definitive introduction to QED for a lay readership without any distortion of the basic science. Characterized by Feynman's famously original clarity and humor, this popular book on QED has not been equaled since its publication.
Customer Reviews:
Mind-blowing.......2006-12-10
Feynman makes it easy for the curious amateur to understand. This book is accessible and mind-blowing. Everyone should read it. And there is little if any math so don't be intimidated.
Just the facts, Ma'am.......2006-08-07
In the Introduction to the 'Strange Theory of Light and Matter' Feynman tells us that what he likes to talk about is the "part of physics that is known, rather than a part that is unknown." And he goes on to give us a thumbnail sketch, a "physicist's history of physics," which shows how physicist's, in their quest to describe the world, continually reduce a group of seemingly unrelated phenomenon to a single phenomenon. So heat and sound were found, thanks to Newton, to be reducible to laws of motion, while electricity, magnetism and light were reducible to Maxwell's electromagnetic wave. In this way physicist's explain the world.
Here one is almost tempted to say that they proceed much as religion and ideology do. Religion has from the beginning of recorded history been taking phenomenon and feelings, like storms and suffering or aging and despair, and molding them into an internally coherent explanation of all that is and was and will be. They do this by separating the relevant from the incidental, then uncovering the essential by excluding the accidental. They simplify. In similar ways ideologues like the communists take what at one time were discreet incidents and disparate facts (for instance, the poverty of the third world and imperialism) and weave them into a grand general explanation. Is science merely the latest avatar of religion? - Or perhaps it is an ideology without tears?
Not so fast! Feynman goes on to show us that attempts to explain the atomic world foundered on the laws of motion. He shows us that the rescue of those shipwrecked on the shoals of classical theory involved the invention of a new, counter-intuitive theory, Quantum Mechanics. He then goes on, while discussing a small portion of that theory, to give us the (deliberately) hilarious and 'absurd' example of how physicists predict how many photons, out of a given number, will be reflected back from a surface. 'Draw little arrows on a piece of paper' and watch the clock, he tells us. And with no explanation as to why this procedure works! Of course, for physics, what matters is that it does work. Physicists have been forced "away from making absolute predictions to merely calculating the probability of an event." But where is the essential, the eternal, the necessary?
Perhaps this is what Feynman is driving at. Science describes, it doesn't explain why. We should all wonder at that. The great 'philosophical' questions that drive theology and political ideology are beyond the purview of physics. Science doesn't create worlds; nor does it 'interpret' or change them, it simply describes what it finds. (It is technology that changes the world.) Freud saw fit to end one of his books by saying that 'our science is no illusion, but it would be an illusion to believe you can find elsewhere what it does not offer.' But how much truer this is of physics! One is then perhaps not surprised to come away from this little book wondering exactly what the status of philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and religion would be in a genuinely scientific world.
But of course there will never be, given human irrationality, an entirely scientific human culture. This book is a superb introduction to quantum electrodynamics. It's 'experimentalism' and agnosticism towards grand philosophical explanations I found very congenial and convincing. Feynman is an engaging personality and this is an entertaining book. While one doesn't need a degree in physics and math to understand him a lay competence and interest in math and physics is certainly necessary. For those of us still living in a Newtonian world, a dwindling number to be sure, this book will have several surprising moments. But that really is part of the show!
The shortest, clearest and "most physical" description of quantum theory without compromise in the accuracy.......2006-01-21
I had read a few books on quantium physics before, some are serious textbooks, and some are books for general readers, without even a single equation. This book, catagorized as the latter case, is the shortest, clearest and "most physical" description I've ever read.
It really tells you what the physicsts are doing behind the equations. I felt I solved many of the puzzles I had before, especially the intuitive meaning of the wave function and how the amplitudes really combine "visually".
It's a must read if you have tried other books on quantum theory but get confused (which I think is very likely). One major difference of this book from other books is Feynman didn't try to invent analogous but confusing things to explain difficult concepts. He really introduces you the subject itself.
Whew! Worth the effort..........2005-12-23
Feynman believed that if you truly understand a concept than you should be able to express it in a way that any educated person can understand it. Thus you have a smallish book (based on lectures) on some of the most obtuse subjects in physics in a way that is entertaining, readable, and understandable.
This is no "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" (if you haven't read it you should...) but still shows his wit and curiosity. One reason I think the book is so good is that he was instrumental in working out many of the ideas he presents so he's not just repeating someone else's work.
The concepts can be hard to grasp but the book is well worth the trouble.
Feynman's Nobel prize winning subject, QED........2005-09-15
This book is basically a transcript of a series of lectures Professor Feynman gave at UCLA and in New Zealand. The lectures were given at the University of Auckland in New Zealand because Feynman wanted to "try out" the lectures on people far from home to see if they would work. [...] The book QED attempts successfully to give the reader an idea of how light works at a fundamental level and is actually very weird and untuitive due to our inherited and evolved senses and perception. Feynman preps the reader to anticipate these very strange unintuitive scientific findings and goes on to explain them very well.
Product Description
The increasing precision of experimental data in many areas of elementary particle physics requires an equally precise theoretical description. In particular, radiative corrections (described by one- and multi-loop Feynman diagrams) have to be considered. Although a growing number of physicists are involved in such projects, multi-loop calculation methods can only be studied from original publications. With its coverage of multi-loop calculations, this book serves as an excellent supplement to the standard textbooks on quantum field theory. Based around postgraduate-level lectures given by the author, the material is suitable for both beginners and graduate students.
Book Description
Of equal value to students and experts, this self-contained, systematic introduction features formal derivations of the quantized field matrix elements for numerous laser-molecule interaction effects: one- and two-photon absorption and emission, Rayleigh and Raman scattering, linear and nonlinear optical processes, the Lamb shift, and much more.
Customer Reviews:
Best book on the Subject.......1999-12-31
An absolutely excellent book, a must for anybody seriously studying the interaction of electromagnetic fields with molecules. Very clearly written, totally self-contained, a rare treausure
Book Description
Photons and Atoms
Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics provides the necessary background to understand the various physical processes associated with photon-atom interactions. It starts with elementary quantum theory and classical electrodynamics and progresses to more advanced approaches. A critical comparison is made between these different, although equivalent, formulations of quantum electrodynamics.
Using this format, the reader is offered a gradual, yet flexible introduction to quantum electrodynamics, avoiding formal discussions and excessive shortcuts. Complementing each chapter are numerous examples and exercises that can be used independently from the rest of the book to extend each chapter in many disciplines depending on the interests and needs of the reader.
Customer Reviews:
concise but inspiring.......2007-01-18
The subjects are laied out according to logical progression with rich exercises which are quite helpful to review my own understanding. However some subjects treated as complinent shoud be a part of the main text in my opinion, since I must have left the main text some time to read through the compliment.
My only physics book.......2000-04-22
Although I am a physicist and possess many books, for a long time my collection contained only a single book related to physics: Photons and Atoms. It is the most pedagogical text to be found on the fundamental aspects of the quantized interaction of matter with light. It's concise, clear, and convincing. The reader is never left mystified about any technical detail: no assumptions or approximations are left unexplained or swept under the rug. Yet, in spite of the high technical level the text is full of insights and simple intuitive pictures as well. Worth mentioning are also the exercises in each Chapter, which are remarkably useful and rewarding, Moreover, the solutions are given and display the same clarity of style and insightful remarks as the main text. The main emphasis of the book is on the nonrelativistic formulation of QED, but, of course, there is also a chapter devoted to the relativistic version that includes a description of how to take in a proper fashion the non-relativistic limit. Also questions of gauge, such as concerning the often confusing choice between "p.A" and "r.E" are treated, and it is, e.g., explicitly shown how in numerical problems the two are not always equivalent, as approximations made are not necessarily gauge invariant. Is there anything bad to say about this book? Almost not: for a while I had the impression that this book was the only one without any typographical errors, but in the meantime I have discovered 2. To be a bit more serious, maybe there is something: the book focuses on fundamental issues and, hence, if you expect ---especially given the title of the book---to read about problems such as spontaneous emission or laser-induced ionization of atoms, then you will be disappointed. In that case, you will have to check out the companion volume: atom-photon interactions. But hey, that's not such a bad book either.
Book Description
This is the second volume of the third edition of a successful text, now substantially enlarged and updated to reflect developments over the last decade in the curricula of university courses and in particle physics research. Volume I covered relativistic quantum mechanics, electromagnetism as a gauge theory, and introductory quantum field theory, and ended with the formulation and application of quantum electrodynamics (QED), including renormalization. Building on these foundations, this second volume provides a complete, accessible, and self-contained introduction to the remaining two gauge theories of the standard model of particle physics: quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the electroweak theory. The treatment significantly extends that of the second edition in several important respects. Simple ideas of group theory are now incorporated into the discussion of non-Abelian symmetries. Two new chapters have been added on QCD, one devoted to the renormalization group and scaling violations in deep inelastic scattering and the other to non-perturbative aspects of QCD using the lattice (path-integral) formulation of quantum field theory; the latter is also used to illuminate various aspects of renormalization theory, via analogies with condensed matter systems. Three chapters treat the fundamental topic of spontaneous symmetry breaking: the (Bogoliubov) superfluid and the (BCS) superconductor are studied in some detail; one chapter is devoted to the implications of global chiral symmetry breaking in QCD; and one to the breaking of local SU(2)xU(1) symmetry in the electroweak theory. Weak interaction phenomenology is extended to include discussion of discrete symmetries and of the possibility that neutrinosare Majorana (rather than Dirac) particles. Most of these topics are normally found only in more advanced texts, and this is the first book to treat them in a manner accessible to the wide readership that the previous editions have attracted.
Customer Reviews:
Very clear and readable.......2007-03-21
Like the 2nd edition this 2 volume set is very readable. I like it's informal style, and the wealth of background material presented, as well as the hints about when to expect further discussions of a subject in succeding chapters. By far the best Quantum Field Theory book I've come across.
more understandable QFT for beginners.......2005-09-17
The 3rd edition of that book clarified to a degree the fog left in my mind by a two-semester QFT course. The book is better suited for beginners than Peskin & Shroeder, Mandl & Show or Lahiri & Pal simply because it senses better the difficult points for beginners and tries to explain them at lower level. It focuses on the main concepts and doesn't try to `cover broad material in shortest time' or get into extreme computational technicalities totally irrelevant to beginners. The correct historical perspective of many ideas is given and the important historical papers are cited. The theory is frequently compared to the experimental results. Violin string is used as a prototype of a continuous system described by a classical field which is the first field quantized later. The book develops physical intuition showing how a scattering process can be analyzed in full QED (all fields are operators), in semiclassical approximation (all fields are operators except the EM field) or using the lowest level wavefunction approximation (all fields are treated like wave functions just like scattering in nonrelativistic QM) often getting the same result (see chapter 8). Important concepts like Feynman diagrams and Renormalization of a theory are first explored in a simple theoretical playground - a hypothetical `ABC theory' of three massive scalar fields with an interaction ABC term - and later discussed again in the case of QED with all the complications like fermions and Electromagnetic gauge field.
Topics discussed include gauge invariance principle; relativistic field equations describing free particles like Klein-Gordon and Dirac; Feynman interpretation of the negative energy solutions of Dirac eq. (no its not `antiparticle going back in time'); Dirac equation with EM field; Lagrangian and Hamiltonian densities for continuous systems; quantization of free fields like KG (real and complex scalar), Dirac and Electromagnetic field [the quantization is by postulating commutators/anticommutators, no path integrals]; Normal ordering of operators; Interaction picture for interacting fields, Time ordering of operators, Dyson expansion of the S matrix; Wick's theorem; scattering processes in QED at tree level; Ward identity; form factors for scattering from non point particle; parton model, Bjorken scaling; diagrams with loops, regularization and renormalization of ultraviolet divergences in QED.
It took me a month and a half to read the book and solve all problems (10 problems per chapter on average). The problems are exactly the ones every beginner should solve and usually revolve about filling in details from the text or proving statements in the text. Solving them is usually easy with a few exceptions and teaches you the typical computational tricks of the trade. You have to know quantum mechanics (at least have seen scattering theory) and special relativity. You have to at least have heard of Green function and contour integration in the complex plane. The book provides nice appendices about all these.
Not everything is crystal clear in that book, sometimes it took me a few days for an idea to sink in or I understood some paragraphs only after I read the whole book. Other ideas I did not understand at all. Sometimes it's hard to tell what they are trying to say although they say it several times from different angles ... The authors should work on expressing an idea in a direct succinct way once and for all instead of repeating several fuzzy versions of it. Overall that book made me understand MUCH more than a regular QFT course and I highly recommend it as a prep for such a course.
If you are having trouble with QFT - BUY THIS BOOK!.......2003-04-13
This book (2nd edition) has 15 chapters . I have just finished chapter 4 entitled QFT and I am compeled to write this review! After a year of studying of QFT informally I can report that this is the way to introduce yourself to the topic. I've been through Mandl & Shaw, Peskin & Schoeder, Ryder, Weinberg and a few others and this is heads and tails the BEST intro available. In 42 pages, Aitchison & Hey make the transistion from classical to QM and from QM to QFT as gracefully as I can conceive. For example, the transition from the discrete Lagrangian to the field Lagrangian is very explicit. One benfit of this is that the dependence of L on partial of phi wrt x is clearly motivated leading to the manifestly relativistically invariant form of L. They explicitly develop physical intuition at every step of the way - for example, this is the only book that I have found that explicitly asks the question where is QM's wavefunction in the QFT formalism? Answer - The vacuum to one-particle matrix elements of the field operators. The transistion from free fields to interacting fields is far clearer than any other treatment I've seen. I also appreciated that the problems were used to basically fill in details left out of the text. I was able to 'practice' the various kinds of manipulations that are required.
Amazingly clear introduction to the subject.......1998-08-03
This book is the best book I've seen on the subject. The qualitative description of qunatum field theory in particular are amazingly lucid for the subject. The only possible flaw in the book is that the problems at the end of each chapter are both few in number and for the most part do not challenge the student at all; for the most part they are just rote calculations.
Book Description
The first comprehensive treatment of quantum physics to appear in any language, this classic introduction to the basic theory is still highly recommended and still in wide use today as both a text and a reference. 37 figures. 13 tables. Introduction. List of references. Bibliography.
Customer Reviews:
Learnable QED & THE bremsstrahlung treatment........2000-04-26
To be honest, I am trying to learn formal QED, and this text is 'feeding' well. Heitler comes up with the goods..you feel you have actually covered some topic-(rather than some 'lite' or cryptic version). Having said that modern criticisms would be the usage of 'old' vector operations notation (minor taste criticism-you get used to the use of '[ , ]' for vector products for example); and also omission of 'Feynman diagrams'. However the additional material (to the 1934 edition) published in this reprinted 1954 edition gives reference to Feynman and Schwingers work prior to this date.
For THE treatment of quantum bremsstrahlung theory (first approximation), here is the most oft quoted reference (with maybe an option on Kramers 1923 'Bohrian' quantum paper)and arguably the most relevant. A must if only for this. Like most books written around this time in Dovers catalogue, it is well written, readable, and precise in the analysis- skipping math steps where truly reasonable. A gold mine for those of us trying to get to grips with the subject of the title.
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Atom-Field Interactions and Dressed Atoms (Cambridge Studies in Modern Optics)
G. Compagno ,
R. Passante , and
F. Persico
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521419484 |
Book Description
The interaction between atoms and electromagnetic fields is an area of central importance to the investigation of fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics. The authors provide an introduction to the theory concerning this interaction by describing the different forms of the interaction and dealing with how these interactions lead to the formation of dressed states, in the presence of vacuum fluctuations as well as in the presence of external fields. They also cover the role of dressed atoms in quantum measurement theory and the physical interpretation of vacuum radiative effects. Treating a key field on the boundary between quantum optics and quantum electrodynamics, the book will be of great use to graduate students, as well as to established experimentalists and theorists, in either of these areas.
Customer Reviews:
Some comments.......2000-11-22
'Atom-Field Interactions and Dressed Atoms' is a useful book for graduate students and reseachers in the field of Quantum Optics. The interaction between atoms and electromagnetic fields is a research area which demands strong backgound in mathematics and numerical simulations. From this point of view the authors give a very good approach of the subject. Furthermore, modern topics in Atom Optics are highlighted. This book could be a guide for researchers dealing with Atom Optics.
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Atomic Inner-Shell Physics (Physics of Atoms and Molecules) (Physics of Atoms and Molecules)
Bernd Crasemann
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 0306418479 |
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Atoms in Unusual Situations (NATO Science Series: B:)
Jean P. Briand
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Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (Advances in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics)
Manufacturer: Academic Press
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ASIN: 0120922452 |
Book Description
(Short)
Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics, edited by Paul Berman, brings together reviews by some of the world's leading experts who summarize the progress they and others have made to date and look forward to future theoretical and experimental developmentsin this field. The level of presentation is suitable for the advanced graduate student and research scientist seeking an excellent overview of this subject.
Key Features
* Significant topics covered include:
* Interaction of atoms and electrons with radiation fields inside a cavity
* Modification of atomic and cavity field evolution resulting from atom-cavity field coupling
* Creation of correlated atom-field states using cavity quantum electrodynamics
* Level shifts of atoms and electrons near conducting surfaces
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