Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

by David J. Griffiths

Book Overview

Changes and additions to the new edition of this classic textbook include a new chapter on symmetries, new problems and examples, improved explanations, more numerical problems to be worked on a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131118927
• ISBN13: 9780131118928
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.2" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic First Book

The best introduction to quantum mechanics around, without doubt. Griffiths knows how to drive home the key concepts. Insufficient for a graduate student, but a highly desirable supplement to Shankar/Cohen-Tannoudji because Griffiths reminds you what is and what is not important concisely. There is no question that this book is brilliantly written. The smartest people are those who understand how to say things concisely and to the point, not pretentious people who hide behind equations and jargon because they cannot communicate ideas. Griffiths is obviously a very smart man. This is written as a graduate physicist. People who say that this book is insufficiently rigorous tend to be (but not necessarily) intellectual snobs who want to impress themselves and others by saying "Oh, Griffiths is too low level for me, I'm so great..." This is an INTRODUCTION, and that's what it serves to do...science was created by men based on intuition and logical clues, not by the gods of math (and I'd argue most of what is key in math came from mathematical clues and intuition before the proofs and notation...before derivatives and integrals were well defined, people were using them to solve physical problems).

An excellent introductory text book if you want to learn

I used this text book for my undergraduate quantum mechanics class. In that class, we covered basically everything in Griffiths. I have since gone on to graduate school. I have found myself very well prepared and I still use Griffiths as a reference because it explains basic ideas and basic problems better than most other text books. More importantly, it provided me with a good foundation for further study.This text book is a great introductory text book. It is a text book for students for whom quantum mechanics is a new subject. It is not a text book for people who already know any significant amount of quantum mechanics, nor is it a great text to use for independent study (unless you work the problems and have some way of checking yourself.) Shankar is too advanced for most students new to the subject. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. The only school I know of which uses it is Yale, and they count on students having a stronger background than most students at most schools have. Moreover, I know from personal experience that teachers at Yale focus on getting students to calculate the right answer rather than developing a solid understanding of the ideas behind the physics. It's also too much material to cover in a standard two semester course where the material is completely new. Griffiths is designed such that it can be used for the quantum mechanics classes at most universities -- ie, if students haven't had every other physics class before they use this book or if some of their background is a little weak, they aren't screwed. This may not agree with some people's notions of how physics should be taught, but the reality is that you can't teach every physics class as if the students had already mastered every subject except that one. This is the reality at most universities.The fact that this book is accessible does not make it bad. Physics is a wonderful, beautiful subject and we're being really stupid if we judge how "advanced" a book is by how difficult it is to understand. This is a suicidal attitude for our field. I've been reading physics books for a long time, and most of the ones which are difficult to read are difficult because they're not well written, not because the material is inherently difficult.This book also cannot compensate for its misuse or for bad teaching. When I took the class, the teacher assigned some of the basic problems and some of the difficult problems. That way we made sure we knew the basics before we moved on to the difficult problems. If you're only doing the simple problems, it's your fault you're not getting anything out of it. If you're only doing the computationally difficult problems, you're missing some beautiful, simple examples. The physics is neither more real nor more important if it takes you a day to calculate rather than ten minutes.This is a problem-centered book, but honestly, that's the way most of

A jungle worth crossing... but not without a guide.

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.

A well written elementary QM text.

David Griffiths concentrates on the classic and important QM proplems, such as the Schrodinger equation, the finite square well, the delta function potential, the hydrogen atom, spin, etc. He does not touch on QM "side line" issues. Thus the students efforts are most efficient. Griffiths develops each subject in a balanced and easy to understand way. His book could be home studied without assistance from an instructor, which is certainly not true of many QM texts. The exercises are well selected and appropriate, and many of them have implicit or explicit answers provided. Along with QM by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, I would rate this one of the best choices for the beginning student. While Cohen-Tannoudji is comprehensive and elegant, Griffiths is basic and focused.