Statistical Physics: Statics, Dynamics and Renormalization

Rating:
Summary: Charting the right direction.
Review: I would never, ever call this book a 'solid basis' for statistical mechanics--that's Landau, or Sommerfeld.

What Kadanoff does do, like other great theorists, is make the field seem real. For instance, Feynman's diagrams don't add anything new to the mathematics, but they set the idea into focus in a way that makes you think differently about the real world. Before Gell-Mann, chromodynamics was just a mathematical idea: reading him makes you think there's really particles. And who really understood polarization until reading Dirac?

Kadanoff does that for critical phenomena. Even when he covers the material in a uselessly glossy way, he sets the theory on its feet and opens up the idea for more work. I've gotten tons of ideas from reading him.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps to be inproved in subsequent editions
Review: This book is a solid basis for a course in statistical mechanics. Since it was a first edition, there were many typographical errors that made some of the reading a little sketchy in parts. IF you have the patientence to sit down and derive some of the more important results that Kadanoff glosses over, you will greatly benefit from the book. It is a solid book, complete in it's presentation of the material. At time his notation can be a bit unorthordox and can take getting used to, especially for those who are more strict in their "mathematical hygene." One very nice features of the book is that the level of the problems lends themselves very well to a course. In other words an instructor won't have to make up his/her own pwoblems for the most part.