selfAdjoint said:
[Ryder] Patrick didn't like it, but that is probably because it didn't lead him right into productive calculations. P&S does that, but it sacrifices some things (leasurely exposition and real rigor for two) to that goal.
Oh, well, Ryder is ok, and as you point out, many books have their good and bad points. Ryder has also its good points, especially a much better treatment of the implications of the Poincare group for the possible representations. But if you teach yourself something, you need as a start, one single book that will break the ice. Jumping around several leads you too much astray in the beginning, and I thought that in "breaking the ice" P&S really did a great job. Ok, it is maybe not rigorous and the mostly heard comment is that "it focusses too much on the technicalities of calculation".
My experience (which is of course personal) is that in order to learn a subject, you should first learn to handle the machinery in order to produce some results, before delving in too much abstract rigor and justification. But _some_ justification is of course needed to make the story hang together, so there's a tradeoff to be made between rigorous demonstration, and just calculation recipes, and that's where I think P&S did a great job which helped me personally a lot.
When trying to understand the Dirac equation, I don't care at that moment if the Dirac equation has to be what it is based upon the Poincare group. I would like to see a link to make it sound acceptable, but I don't need a rigorous proof (however I hate a handwaving argument that is presented as if it were a rigorous proof). And then I'd like to see how this fits into field quantization. And then I'd like to see how I'm supposed to turn the handles of this thing to get out some real numbers. Once I feel comfortable with it, I like to go back on my footsteps, and think about the more abstract structure, and why things are that way and not in another way. But only after I feel comfortable with its handles. At that point, I guess you should put P&S aside and look elsewhere (my guess is Weinberg) ; it can also be that certain obscure points in P&S have a more enlightening exposition somewhere else.
So as a second go, you should look at a lot of books and try to learn from all the different viewpoints. But you know you won't get lost this time around, being already somewhat comfortable with the material.
cheers,
Patrick.
It's a medium-sized .pdf file...
Bjorken,Drell (both of them,though one has the title "Relativistic Quantum Mechanics"),Landau & Lifschtiz,Jauch & Rohrlich,Ahiezer & Berestetzkyy,Greiner,etc.These all monographies...Chapters on QED are found in all QFT books,starting with the first volume of Weinberg,then Iztykson-Zuber,L.H.Ryder,etc...
Thought they really do not deserve...
