Average customer rating:
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An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (Frontiers in Physics)
Michael E. Peskin , and
Dan V. Schroeder
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers
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ASIN: 0201503972 |
Customer Reviews:
Perfect........2007-08-10
I received the book as it should be: knew. And it cames before the estimated time.
Wow, does this suck . . . get a different book!.......2007-06-13
Ok--I just need to help lower the overall rating for this book. I think the people who love it are professors and students who already are familiar with QFT--because it glosses over everything, does pertinent examples, etc. But that's just it, it GLOSSES over everything. Note that nearly all the higher reviews say things like: "oh, you wouldn't want to start with this book." or "Everyone knows that you're going to need more books than this one to understand it . . ." I couldn't even figure out how to create a Feynmann diagram from this book, let alone what one MEANT. FYI, my favorite QFT book so far is Weinberg's Quantum Theory of Fields.
This book is a very very very bad book which you never buy........2007-01-20
Absolutely no logic.
Perfectly nonclear.
No subject.
Mathematically poor.(very poor.)
Nonneccessary words.
No depth.
Not for self-study.
Just arrangement.
No physical insight.
No process.
No thinking.
This is indeed not a book.
This is a stuff for a vanity.
I wonder whether Peskin and Schroeder are genuine physicists.
Don't make the same fault I did!.......2006-12-16
Hi there!
The important information first: I'm a graduate student, mainly interested in theoretical physics. At the moment, I'm trying to get a deeper understanding of QFT.
Peskin's QFT book is NOT the one you should buy if you want to UNDERSTAND renormalization.
I learned the basics of QFT (\phi^4 and QED up to a first contact with renormalization - "trivial" subtraction of infinities) in a lecture and I finally felt like: "What does renormalization mean? What is it good for? Is there a deeper truth in it?" Well, the answer to the last question is definitely yes. It's about the Beta function. This function tells you how the coupling constants of a QFT behave at different momenta. E.g., we can learn from it why perturbation theory works for QED at low energies and for QCD at high energies (I think, this is amazing).
What I just said I learned from Huang's book. Peskin "deals" with it in chapters 10 to 12. In the middle of chapter 12 I finally said to myself: "Hey, don't feel stupid. This book is just completely incomprehensible here."
In my opinion, if you want to see behind renormalization (and therefore behind any QFT(!!)), don't buy Peskin's book. Any other book is better regarding this issue.
It is sad that we don't have a better book out there..........2006-05-28
The main problem of this book: what exactly is it supposed to be?
If it is an introduction, then the opening chapters are written at a level too sophisticated that an average first-time student can't handle.
If it aims to be a "bible" of the subject, then the later chapters are far too technical, loaded with only Feynman diagram calculations for standard model. Not being a phenomenologist, I personally have very little interest in all the technical detail, and apparently several other reviewers share my view here.
Now let me gives some examples to support my claim.
First, C, P and T symmetries are introduced very early on (right after Dirac spinor), and in a very formal way. Yes, they logically belong there, but in an "introduction" of the subject you don't throw out an isolated topic like this which you don't make use of in the following few hundred pages.
The part on cannonical quantization is written at a very fast pace. A complex scalar field is probably the first model you can construct with charged particles. And guess what kind of treatment it receives in this book? Not a single word in the main text. The problem 2 of that chapter essentially asks you to work out the content of this model with few hints given. If you have troble working it out, which is not uncommon for a first-timer, then you won't see the logic behind the decomposition of a complex Dirac field either. This is done in the following chapter, with no explaination.
Like the charged scalar field example, some important pieces of knowledge are hidden only in the exercises. So if you treat these high-power opening chapters as your bible-type reference, you will often end up in the frustrating situation that the book tells you to work out by yourself what you are seeking in the first place.
Now get to the later parts of the book. As I mentioned above, the second half of the book is almost conceptually too simple, overloaded with technical details.
This downfall begins around the renormalization group. On the back of this book, this Prof. Micheal Dine is qouted: "it is the only field theory text with a thoroughly modern, Wilsonian treatment of renormalization". The connection between the Wilsonian idea and dimensional regularization/renormalization scale is shaky at best. You read the text, and are left puzzled at the magic: how does a cut-off scale become some (much lower) arbitrary momentum scale? No explaination. The Wilsonian theory is completely isolated and have little connection with the rest of the renormalization section.
Furthermore, the book does not do a very good job on Lie algebra and non-abilien Lie groups. I mean, come on, if this is an "introduction" type of book, make it more readable. If this is a "bible" type of book, make it more comprehensive.
Having voiced all my bad opinions, I have to admit that the book has its merit. Bottom line is, this is a book written by phenomenologists for phenomenologists. If you view it from such an angle, it is not too badly written after all, and does cover most of the important topics a phnomenologist would want to know. But you may want to start from a more accessible text such as Ryder.
If you are a theorist, but not a phenomenologist, then, well, let's say the ability of getting through the first part perfectly is the minimum requirement for your research.
If you are an experimentalist, don't bother.
Book Description
Most of the numerical predictions of experimental phenomena in particle physics over the last decade have been made possible by the discovery and exploitation of the simplifications that can happen when phenomena are investigated on short distance and time scales. This book provides a coherent exposition of the techniques underlying these calculations. After reminding the reader of some basic properties of field theories, examples are used to explain the problems to be treated. Then the technique of dimensional regularization and the renormalization group. Finally a number of key applications are treated, culminating in the treatment of deeply inelastic scattering.
Customer Reviews:
Very useful for the student who practices renormalization for the first time.......2007-01-18
It really shed light on some concepts that other books simply do not discuss. It is also the only one I know that gives a theoretical basis for understanding dimensional regularization.
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Renormalization: An Introduction (Theoretical and Mathematical Physics)
Manfred Salmhofer
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 3540646663 |
Book Description
This book grew out of a one-term course on renormalization at ETH Zürich. It provides a mathematically rigorous, yet simple and clear introduction to that subject. It can be read by students from the third year on and it leads the reader to a level where he or she can start reading the current research literature. The book gives a thorough introduction to field-theoretic techniques such as Feynman graph expansions and renormalization. Special effort has been made to make all proofs as simple as possible by using generating function techniques throughout. Renormalization is done by using an exact renormalization group differential equation. This technique, developed during the last few years and now appearing in a textbook for the first time, provides simple but complete proofs of renormalizability theorems.
Customer Reviews:
A little words.......2000-05-09
It's a door of normalization method. A good introduction!
Book Description
The successful calculation of critical exponents for continuous phase transitions is one of the main achievements of theoretical physics over the last quarter-century. This was achieved through the use of scaling and field-theoretic techniques which have since become standard equipment in many areas of physics, especially quantum field theory. This book provides a thorough introduction to these techniques. Continuous phase transitions are introduced, then the necessary statistical mechanics is summarized, followed by standard models, some exact solutions and techniques for numerical simulations. The real-space renormalization group and mean-field theory are then explained and illustrated. The final chapters cover the Landau-Ginzburg model, from physical motivation, through diagrammatic perturbation theory and renormalization to the renormalization group and the calculation of critical exponents above and below the critical temperature.
Customer Reviews:
A nice presentation of the field-theoretic version of RG.......2000-06-01
This is a highly pedagogical book on the theory of critical phenomena and the renormalization group (RG). Field-theoretic methods are introduced gradually, and the physics is always illustrated with well-chosen examples. Technical details are explained thoroughlly and oftentimes summarized in ``boxes'' which span most of the book. At the end of every chapter, a set of problems allows the reader to test his/her understanding of the subject matter, and solutions to the problems are provided at the end of the book. Two regrets though: (i) that the authors did not touch at all the (less rigorous) but highly intuitive and widely used momentum shell renormalization group technique; and (ii) that the treatment of two-dimensional systems and the Kosterlitz thouless transition is a little superficial. Apart from that, this book is just great. A very useful book.
Product Description
Text in Russian.
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Introduction to Renormalization Group Methods in Physics
Richard J. Creswick ,
Horacio A. Farach , and
Charles P. Poole
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons
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ASIN: 047160013X |
Amazon.com
Mark Dunn's early forays into the novel, Ella Minnow Pea and Welcome to Higby, were praised by critics and relished by bibliophiles for their linguistic gamesmanship. But Ibid: A Life easily outdoes its predecessors for literary audacity. The novel purports to be not a novel at all, but the endnotes of a biography. The main text of the supposed life of Jonathan Bashette was destroyed by a careless editor, and, as the wearied author reports in the letters which begin the book, his publisher has decided that the notes can stand alone.
At first, the conceit makes for difficult reading, but Dunn does a remarkable job of slowly revealing three-legged Jonathan Blashette and his odd world without ever departing from the footnote form. Readers learn that Blashette, born in Pettiville, Arkansas, in 1888, was doomed by his extra leg to become a sideshow attraction. But the boy escapes the circus to become a soldier in World War I. There, in the trenches, he first glimpses (or smells) his future calling: male underarm deodorants. Upon his return to the States, he launches the Dandy-de-odor-o Corporation and marries several times (each wife meeting a bizarre end in the cursed city of Boston). Though rocked by adversity, the fictional Blashette lives a rich life full of encounters with the writers, politicians, artists, and celebrities that marked the 20th Century.
Rather than being a limitation in this quirky Horatio Alger story, the notes offer Dunn freedom to explore the diversity of his imagination with brief sketches and "back-story" that are, in fact, all the story there is. The novel becomes a pastiche of parodies of famous documents, speeches, and poems. Dunn includes the "full text" of Lou Gehrig's farewell speech at Yankee Stadium (which includes thanks for a "'Waldorf' Wardrobe Trunk with vulcanized fiber binding and built-in shoe pockets!") and an alternate version of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 steps, complete with consideration of Dolores Del Rio as a "power greater than ourselves." Throughout, Dunn references one obscure fictional book after another, from Ringleader: A Life in Circus Management, with a Foreword by the Bastard Ringling Brother "Skippy" to a collection of letters sent to a urologist, Confessions to a Pee Pee Doctor.
Ibid's humor, an odd mix of Monty Pythonesque potty jokes and highbrow political and literary satire, may not be for everyone. But Dunn's deft contortion of the usual elements of storytelling into this odd formal experiment proves to be a perfect showcase for his unique wit and intellect. Ibid may not be the Great American Novel, but it is certainly the cleverest American endnotes ever to see print. --Patrick O'Kelley
Book Description
Only Mark Dunn, author of the acclaimed Ella Minnow Pea, would attempt to write a novel entirely in footnotes-and succeed so triumphantly. Ibid is the off-the-wall fictional biography of Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and deodorant entrepreneur. Dunn, a character in his own novel, is Blashette's esteemed biographer. But when Dunn's editor destroys the manuscript in an unfortunate bathtub accident, all that remains are the footnotes, which they arrange to publish in a consummate portrait of Blashette's strangely hilarious life story, one that offers some infinitely interesting morsels of American cultural history. Of course, as endnotes go, these are the tidbits, the marginalia: snippets of commentary, correspondence, court transcripts, song lyrics, and even a recipe for Boston baked beans. But in the topsy-turvy world of Ibid, the footnotes tell the truest story of all.
Customer Reviews:
Help! Ibid.......2007-02-19
It's a pretty brave idea -- a story told entirely through the footnotes of a destroyed novel.
Even a brilliant experimental author like Italo Calvino might have blanched at writing something like this, and Mark Dunn gives it a solid try. The result is a mixed bag -- a wonderfully colourful main character with epic experiences, but written in a densely rambling style.
The novel opens with an exchange of letters between Dunn and his editor. The editor tells Dunn that due to her three-year-old son, the only copy of his manuscript has been reduced to soggy pulp -- the only part left is the footnotes. The editor is willing to publish these, without the novel they belong to, and after a bit of dithering Dunn agrees.
The footnotes sketch out the story of Jonathan Blashette, a man born with three legs. Unsurprisingly his life is an interesting one: he becomes a circus frreak, falls in love many times (a pockmarked prostitute, a transvestite, and a girl whose "life is snuffed out in a tsunami of molasses," among others), goes to war, becomes a deodorant king, and encounters countless important personages -- celebrities, inventors, politicians, and more.
"Ibid" sounds like an impossible way to write a book, let alone a fictional memoir. Come on, who can tell a story through footnotes, which by definition are dependent on the main text? Which in this case, was destroyed in a bathtub by a three-year-old?
But Dunn actually does a pretty decent job bringing Blashette's story to life, through a series of notes for the text we never see. These footnotes are detailed and kind of kooky (Greta Garbo announcing, "I vant to be alone... with this big plate of sliced beets. Bring me some tripe!"), and touch on major world events like the invention of the jigsaw puzzle.
Unfortunately, "Ibid" keeps getting tangled in its own oddball narrative. It starts off well through the weird letters ("I know you never use the phone, fearing electrical shock") and Blashette's boyhood, but then Dunn seems to realize that this is going to be a very short book, and some of the footnotes become so extensive and rambling that the story gets lost.
That's too bad, because Blashette's story is so fascinating that you wish the manuscript hadn't been wrecked. Blashette is a likably strange guy with a compassionate streak, who runs into all sorts of weird people over the course of his life -- including some who were real, as a racist (fictional) letter from Frank L. Baum displays.
"Ibid: A Novel" is a strange, ambitious novel that trips over its own feet (all three of them). It has some definite flaws, but is still a pleasantly kooky read.
A life creatively told in footnotes.......2005-07-19
Three-legged Jonathan Blashette was the founder of a successful deodorant company and a forward-looking humanitarian of the early 1900s. Although he was not a particularly extraordinary man, his extra limb notwithstanding, the interest in this story lies not in the fictional biography of Blashette himself as much as in the minutiae at the margins of his life. Author Mark Dunn, who wrote the whimsical word-play novel "Ella Minnow Pea," has pushed the boundaries of fiction even farther with "Ibid." As Dunn states in the acknowledgments, he sought to "step wide of the narrative box" by crafting a story solely through the use of footnotes. As constrained as the idea sounds, it actually works.
Through the footnotes with their interviews, excerpts from articles and diaries, and accounts of historical events, the reader becomes acquainted not only with Blashette, but also with his family, his friends, and society at large. Blashette managed to rub elbows with such celebrities as Rudolph Valentino, Lou Gehrig, and Dylan Thomas. He was placed at the scene of numerous historical events, both well known and obscure. Thus, Dunn asserts, "History can be more fun than dry facts and dates."
The silly-sounding names and titles cited in the footnotes, as well as selections of atrociously composed poems, songs, and essays, spoof their more dry and scholarly real-life counterparts. The tongue-in-cheek details go off on bizarre tangents. In a parody of Wilde's Dorian Gray, an account is given of Blashette having commissioned his deceased true love's portrait and then having it modified every year to age her appearance. In another reference, a description is given of a friend's membership in a small Christian sect that believed Jesus had a dog that accompanied Him as He preached. There is an amusing account of a devastating squirrel migration in 1826 that destroyed crops. Another humorous segue is a court deposition, recorded during a lawsuit against Blashette's deodorant company, that is written in the form of a play script,
Where Dunn will go from here is anyone's guess. Will he perhaps try a palindromic novel, or one written without any letter "e"? Time will tell. In the meanwhile, enjoy this playful story.
Eileen Rieback
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, and this time it did.......2005-07-06
I adored Ella Minnow Pea. It was witty, well-paced, inventive, funny and endearing. It is rare that a comic novel packs such a serious message.
Ibid., the story of three-legged Jonathan Bleshette, carried solely through "endnotes" because the manuscript was lost in a bathtub, is another self-conscious attempt by Dunn to reinvent the novel. I would like to think that he succeeded, and indeed about 20 pages into the book I thought he'd succeeded admirably.
Unfortunately, as the book goes on, it seems more and more like a one-note piano. Bleshette is, again quite consciously, like Zelig (or the uncredited Forrest Gump); he meets numerous famous people in his life, often in unusual ways. There is a constant theme of the women in his life meeting their end in Boston, until his great love, the prostitute Great Jane, breaks the "Boston curse". But so what. Despite his ability as a novelist to invent any source he wants, from transcripts of conversations to the notes Bleshette and the future Rudolph Valentino scribbled for stage names for the latter and a deodorant brand for the former, Dunn fails to make either Bleshette or the other characters come alive. The last two-thirds of the novel are rather boring, and little comes of the possibilities that the first bits promised.
Great Jane, for instance, seems at first to have possibilities, and although she ends up as Lady Jane, and tries to save prostitutes from that life, we never get to know her much, or see her plying her trade. The various hangers-on at the deodorant factory have fewer possibilities (the running joke of "she's the one" "no, she's not" is okay but gets tiresome) and Jonathan's relatives seem to come and go without much purpose, the only exception being his father who comes to learn Yiddish after spending his whole life in Arkansas before Jonathan moved him to New York.
But the real problem is the possibilities for Jonathan himself that are not explored in sufficient detail. You'd think a man with three legs would have a set of interesting encounters with tailors; nope. Jonathan goes to war; how were his uniforms made? Can he use three legs as a tripod and hold a machine gun better? No idea. Are there rules to sports that can be gotten around if you have three legs (e.g., catching a football in-bounds)? A possibility not exploited.
The endnote thing is similarly unexploited. If you read endnotes (and I do) one thing you notice is a lot of vituperativeness toward prior biographers. Dunn creates the prior biography ("Three Legs, One Heart") but doesn't take it far enough. Give us a diatribe, Mark, something totally outlandish. Pick on the guy's commas or something, or a perpetual misspelling with endless "sic's".
I'm glad we have authors like Dunn who experiment with the novel; this one just didn't work. At the end he notes his admiration for Woody Allen, and one wonders if he's a fan of the later, unfunny films. This book is a lot like them. A great premise with too few jokes and not enough character.
A disappointment.......2005-07-03
The conceit here is that the only copy of Dunn's latest book, a biography of Jonathan Blashette, "the child circus sideshow performer who later made his fotune in male deodorants", has been lost, and the publisher is making it up to him by publishing the footnotes.
It's an amusing idea but it doesn't quite come off. The problem is that the footnotes aren't. I mean that they are not the type of footnotes that one ordinarily finds in a book. They are either far too long, or contain material that would ordinarily be in the main text, or digress so far off the subject that they would never be included. On top of which, the character is a bit too odd.
What made Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea a delight was that he managed to make its odd premise seem perfectly natural. But here, the story, like Procrustes' victims, seems to have been stretched and chopped to fit the concept.
Nabokov meets Mark Twain.......2004-03-31
A clever idea by the author of the delightful 'Ella Minnow Pea.' But it doesn't quite come off. The mock-pedantic sophistication of Vladimir Nabokov meets the down-home humor of Mark Twain (there's even a reference to the 1910 appearance Halley's comet that marked Twain's death as it had his birth: Mark Dunn's homage to Mark Twain?). But Nabokov did it better in 'Pale Fire,' and Twain did it better every time he put pen to paper. The humor wears thin after about the first 100 pages, and becomes more and more irrelevant. At one point the book's putative author (one Mark Dunn, author Mark Dunn's fictional creation) wonders if the book has been over-researched. No, not really, but he DID throw in everything including the kitchen sink. Exuberance alone cannot a good book make.
Nice try, but no brass ring this time.
Average customer rating:
|
Ibid : A Novel
Mark Dunn
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJKRPA |
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