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Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

List Price: $108.00
Your Price: $108.00
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Griffiths Quantum
Review: I have read both the EM and QM books by Griffiths. I think that the QM book is a must for any physics undergrad. It is very concise and the examples are very helpful. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a firm understanding of the basic principles of QM.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Brevity a serious problem.
Review: There a several things I have come to dislike about this book. The first is in the overall treatment of the subject matter. The explanations are incomplete and sometimes you can be left wondering how one equation follows from another. Griffiths also introduces symbols or notations without giving a formal definition of what it is. As a result of this, reading the actual text is usually of no help when it comes to solving the more difficult problems. It is infuriating to look at a problem for over three hours and still have absolutely no clue as to how to go about solving it. I have no problem with very difficult problems that take hours, but I would like to spend the time actually working on the problem, instead of staring at it, wondering where to start or what that notation means that the author never defined. Not recommended.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Easy to read, not that rigorous
Review: I presume the conversational tone of this text makes it appealing to many people; I found it annoying after a while, and I think he uses it to avoid details in many derivations. The notation is not used consistently, the powerful algebraic principles behind QM are introduced in the third chapter and then hardly used again, and likewise the text relies rather heavily on the coordinate representation and on classical arguments. The greatest shortcoming of the text is its brevity: the descriptions of several topics, including matrix mechanics, scattering, and applications, are incomplete, while other topics, such as the Heisenberg representation and the density matrix, are missing entirely. For an undergraduate course, I recommend Liboff, who I think is clearer, more comprehensive, and features some extra goodies such as a brief introduction to the Dirac and Klein Gordon equations.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent text for the introductory course(s)
Review: I have come to appreciate the style of Griffiths over the past few years. I first had his E&M text as an undergraduate and I was grateful for it's simplicity. I now use the Griffiths E&M text to augment my graduate E&M text by Jackson. This is why Griffiths is a good author. He introduces the subject in a clear and concise manner for the purpose of giving the student a solid background.

I used Griffith's introductory quantum text when I first came to graduate school. I had not yet taken quantum and so I enrolled in the undergraduate course to give myself sufficient background. Now I am taking a graduate course using Merzbacher's text, which is also a good text, and Griffith's text is the perfect companion.

The truth is that no textbook in quantum is completely sufficient for providing a solid background on the subject. The field is relatively new in the realm of physics and I seriously doubt that there are many people on the planet who can say (without their perception clouded by dellusion or arrogance) that they have totally grasped all concepts in the field of quantum physics. One must evolve into a better physicist, and in understanding this very fundamental principle, one can understand that one must start small and eventually progress to bigger things. Griffiths has written a text for those who are taking small or medium sized steps who eventually hope to grasp the concepts introduced in more advanced texts.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good introduction, but not for everyone
Review: This book is a solid introduction to quantum mechanics, although Griffiths sometimes gets caught up in verbal and notational wizardry. The style is light and easy-going, unlike some earlier books on the subject. Griffiths also, not with unlimited success, attempts explain the physical intuition behind QM. However, a caveat to the reader: not all problems in the book are created equal. In my seminar-like class, some problems took five minutes to solve, while on others, the whole class spent a week on.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A jungle worth crossing... but not without a guide.
Review: Griffiths treads an unconventional, good-humored path in this book. Instead of starting, as many introductions to quantum mechanics do, with historical interpretations that lead up to the particle-wave equation, he jumps head-first into problems and examples. This text would be very difficult to tackle alone, but under the tutelage of a good instructor (to help with problems that could very well take all day) is well worth the effort. He never goes too deep, and comes closest to the median, that is, he writes at a level understandable to undergraduates. My biggest vice is his lack of physical or experimental examples; they seem to be an addendum to the mathematics. Also, it sticks to the Schrodinger interpretation nearly throughout, which I think is preferable as an intro to QM, but some fancy graduate students might whine (I think one or two problems deals with the Heisenberg/Linear Algebra approach, and some Singlet, Triplet stuff uses matrices, etc. but that's easy). He brings on some fairly traditional problems, so a student who doesn't have a strong math background might want to get another book as a reference. Like the other reviewer said, there are some very algebraically difficult problems that don't really emphasis conceptual understanding, but QM is hard work, so if you wanna get cookin' this is the book for you.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: sick of griffiths
Review: Get this: I used Griffiths QM book, his E+M book, AND his Introduction to Elementary Particles book all in one year. I took a full year course in QM and E+M and my particles course was one semester. Needless to say, I am SICK of this guy! With that said, I think his E+M book is the worst, then the QM book, and finally the particles book is the most well-written. Since this is a review about his QM book, I'm going to focus on that. I really found this book nice at first, but the exercises soon got so tedious I got sick of it. Studying for exams was tough, since the book does not provide answers for most of the questions. (He only provides answers to the most difficult problems, which are unlikely to ever appear on any exam. And by difficult, I often mean algebraically difficult, not conceptually or otherwise.) As for his writing style, it gets old real quick. By the third or fourth chapter you start noticing how many times he uses italics to emphasize certain points. It loses its point after a while. And soon you realize how, by having about three or four footnotes per page really, and I mean really, slows down the flow of the argument. I can see why people may like this book, but Griffiths is really too unrigorous for my liking. Unless this is a required text, don't waste your money.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: the best QM exam study book(and a great text)
Review: I used this text exclusively to study for the GRE, and have used it as a reference in grad school in all kinds of contexts. While it lacks the number of problems and depth of some of the other basic QM books, in terms of clarity it is unparalleled(I am comparing it to B&J, Schiff, Eisberg, and Landau and Lifschitz here). The only QM book that I have seen that rivals this in readability and clarity is Sakurai.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Clear and concise, but requires supplementation
Review: Griffiths' QM text provides excellent problems and a coherent, though somewhat cryptic, development of the theory. He has a conversational style (also evident in his EM text) that elucidates many of the hard-to-visualize concepts in QM. However, he relies on the use of many specialized techniques to solve problems. If the student is unfamiliar with the mathematical tricks involved, it leads to frustration. I recommend Griffiths' text as the main book in a QM course only if it is supplemented with additional hints (from the professor) on the problems, or with an additional text such as Shankar's or the Eisberg and Resnick work.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Quantum Explained
Review: Simply the best, using plain English!


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