Quantum Mechanics

by Albert Messiah

Book Overview

"Strongly recommended" by the American Journal of Physics, this volume serves as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of physics as well as a reference for professionals. Clear in its presentation and scrupulous in its attention to detail, the treatment originally appeared in a two-volume French edition. This convenient single-volume translation begins with formalism and its interpretation, starting with the origins of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 048678455X
• ISBN13: 9780486784557
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 1152 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Great Value!

This is one of the best quantum books I have used (I am using 4 for my current class and have used 3 other books in past classes). This book is very clear and is the best value for the cost of the book. Much better than other books that were 15 times the price. It is very thorough and has good explanations. Highly recommended.

The best Quantum Mechanics book that has ever been written. For serious people only

The best Quantum Mechanics book that has ever been written. For serious people only. I, as a university physics lecturer of 22 years of experience, very very strongly recommend this book to every serious student. But, these two volume books must be studied with an endless patience. My way of studying it is: two pages a day. Therefore, you can complete them in two years time. By the way, if someone owns a solutions manual these two volume QM books, please notify me at nyildiz@cumhuriyet.edu.tr.

Don't be afraid of the Size

The book is huge, but that's why it includes more complete information about QM. It's easier to understand than some very popular standard and small textbooks. Both physics and math are balanced and self-contained. If you want books of the same quality and better presentation, maybe only Prof. Ta-You Wu's two books about QM would be.Anyway, if you need only one book about QM, this is the best. It's a complete course for senior or graduate students. And it's cheaper.

Handy reference

Messiah is one of those books you can't learn QM from - it's simply too dull and nitpicky, and goes into too much detail. But the same features that make it a poor book to study QM out of make it a very useful reference, and as such I heartly give it the 5 stars it deserves. Messiah covers just about everything an ordinary physicist should know about basic, non-relativistic quantum mechanics, including quite a nice introduction to field quantization and relativistic wave equations. No Berry phase here, but you can find just about any other topic, treated in great detail. No assertment goes unjustified. No stone is left unturned. Messiah also has a good sense of mathematical responsibility, and includes discussions of many questions avoided in other books, e.g., how can the delta function be rigorously defined? It also has a lot of nifty little bonuses no found in other books, such as the bosonic harmonic oscillator, and perturbation expansion using complex integration of Green's function. Very interesting material hard to find elsewhere.The only major problem I have with this book is that it does not treat identical particles using fock space. This is a personal quibble, though. Messiah's treatment of identical particles using permutation operators is thorough and didactic.The book includes useful appendices about the definitions and properties of the special functions he uses (spherical harmonics, bessel functions, and the dreaded confluent-hypergeometric-whatever-function no one likes). Other appendices summarize all the information you'll ever need to remember about Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, and another includes a very good refreshment on group theory needed for QM.This ultra-low-priced heavy-weight all-in-one Dover edition is like a gift from above. I've used and read many other texts - Baym, Sakurai, Shankar, Dirac, Merzbacher (my apologies if I've misspelled his name), Ballentine, Cohen-Tannoudji - but it's Messiah's text I first turn to for a responsible treatment of any subject I feel unsure about. It's almost like that old cliche, "the pages are falling out of my edition ... "

Definitely the classic to rush out and buy

Albert Messiah's Quantum Mechanics has been used for the last 30 years or so by the most part of the people working in QM. Besides you can find it at the list of references of every decent text after its first appearence in 1962. At the University of Valencia, which holds some very nice theoretical physics groups, is given as a reference among Sakurai, Galindo-Pascual or Cohen- Tannaoudji, that also quote it.The first volume deals with the formalism of operators and introduces quantum physics. The second one expands up to advanced topics such as tensorial irreductible operators and the Wigner-Eckard theorem. It fits to an advanced undergraduate or first graduate course, instructors should select the material as it is very comprehensive (about a thousand pages in the french two-volume Dunod edition).It is an excellent choice if you are tired of those smart texts written with the goal of impressing colleagues. You can see clearly that Quantum Mechanics is a coherent physical theory, rather than a gift of heavens given to some divine genious.