Modern Quantum Field Theory: A Concise Introduction

In summary, the conversation revolves around the topic of bad books and which ones have been particularly disliked by the speakers. The conversation begins with a discussion about a forum thread that has been opened to share information about science books that are considered exceptionally bad. The speakers then share their own choices for bad books, including T. Banks' "Modern Quantum Field Theory," which is described as being difficult to understand, and Hobson and Efstathiou's "General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists," which is criticized for its confusing exposition and poor math. Other books mentioned include Hecht's "Optics," Born and Wolf's "Principles of Optics," and books on electronic circuitry and statistical mechanics. The conversation also includes
  • #1
Demystifier
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We usually talk about good books, but we rarely talk about bad books. And that is good.

But sometimes, we find that some book is so bad, so really bad, that we strongly want to tell this to the others. So I open this thread to inform others about science books which you find so bad that it needs to be told.

---------------------------

Here is my choice:
T. Banks, Modern Quantum Field Theory: A Concise Introduction
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521850827/?tag=pfamazon01-20

I've seen many textbooks on QFT, and for me this one is really the worst. From this book I was not able to understand even those things which otherwise I already understand pretty well.
 
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  • #2
Hobson, Efstathiou, "General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521829518/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I asked about this book ages back and eventually took a look at it. It is quite possibly the worst GR book I've ever read. The exposition is so confusing, the technical language is beyond hand-waved, and the math is butchered so much that it would surprise me if anyone ever chooses to use this book willingly.
 
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  • #3
I hate Hecht's Optics. The big one. You know the one. Headache of a book, big verbose info dump with no rhyme or reason.
 
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  • #4
I can recall but not exact name or title or author, a bad G.E.D. book from a bookstore. Some discussions and examples were poor.

I can recall but no longer know the name or author of a physical science graduate level book of maybe about 150 to 200 pages - with about 2 pages of included "errata".
 
  • #5
I know I'm the only one here that will choose this one, but Born & Wolf "Principles of Optics" is nearly unreadable, IMO. Yes, it has all of the stuff in it; but reading it is like swimming through molasses.

In a totally different (and probably ancient) vein: any of the electronics "circuit collection" books, like SAMs etc. They are all crap.
 
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  • #6
Huang's book on statistical mechanics. Traumatizing.

And the sad thing was: my teacher was even worse.

To finish the sadness, I was with him in the teaching committee, where his course was evaluated every year.
 
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  • #7
haushofer said:
Huang's book on statistical mechanics. Traumatizing.
I expect we'll see a lot of stat mech books in this thread. Good stat mech books seem to be a real rarity.

I don't have many truly bad books (cause I mostly go by recommendation or by references from papers), but ho boy do I have a lot of traumatizing books! Brown & Carrington tops that list, closely followed by "Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations" (Grad. Texts in Math., 107) by Peter Olver.
 
  • #8
I thought statistical plasma physics, vol. 1 by Ichimaru was somewhat traumatizing and not very good. It seemed to have a lot of math and little physical insight. If it wasn’t required for a class I never would have spent so much time with it.

jason
 
  • #9
haushofer said:
Huang's book on statistical mechanics. Traumatizing.

And the sad thing was: my teacher was even worse.

To finish the sadness, I was with him in the teaching committee, where his course was evaluated every year.

Why was Huang's book bad?
 
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  • #10
AndreasC said:
I hate Hecht's Optics. The big one. You know the one. Headache of a book, big verbose info dump with no rhyme or reason.
It is the same Hecht who wrote a good book on Quantum Mechanics?
 
  • #11
DaveE said:
I know I'm the only one here that will choose this one, but Born & Wolf "Principles of Optics" is nearly unreadable, IMO. Yes, it has all of the stuff in it; but reading it is like swimming through molasses.

In a totally different (and probably ancient) vein: any of the electronics "circuit collection" books, like SAMs etc. They are all crap.
You aren’t the only one, on both accounts. I have an ex-library copy of the 7th edition of B&W I picked up cheap. It is destined to be donated to someone who will actually use it.

Jason
 
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  • #12
While we're on the topic of bad books, I reviewed several computer science books on C++ back in the mid 90s for the West Publishing Co. One of them, by a chap named Tony Gaddis, was one that I gave a favorable rating, and since then Gaddis has gone on to publish a whole slew of CS textbooks. One of the series still lists me as one of many reviewers.

Another book I reviewed was titled "C++ as a Second Language" or close to that. I don't recall the name of the author, only that he was an Israeli. For reviewing the books I received a small stipend, $100 or $200. This particular book was so bad that I found myself making comments on nearly every manuscript page. After going through about half the book, with most pages annotated with my comments, I decided that the ratio of stipend amount divided by hours spent was as low as I wanted it to go. It seemed to me that the author was writing the book in English as his second language, and had not learned much of anything about good program style. The code formatting was horrible, which made it difficult to follow his logic and the program flow. It's been a long while, but I recall that there were also multiple, significant errors in the book. As a result, I panned the author's attempt, and the publishing house decided to pass on publishing the book.
 
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  • #13
Bad:
Stewart's Calculus
This book wouldn't be on my list if it were not for its popularity in first-year general calculus courses. There are several reasons why I loathe it: The book is wordy and tedious. The derivations are neither rigours nor intuitive/concise. The examples are not that bad, but are definitely not excellent. There are way too many questions after each section so unless you have a professor who assigns you HW questions, you won't be able to know what the good ones are. Also there have been 8 iterations (if my memory serves me right) so far, and these different editions do not vary much in terms of their content, yet their practice questions are different so that students have to buy the same edition of textbook as their professor does. And if they decide to buy the latest one, which they normal would, their students have to spend a ton of money on new textbook because the number of used copies for sale is limited; even if there are some copies which students can find, their resale values will be higher. It is obvious that the author is benefited directly from such practice if we look at his mansion.
1626608671863.png


Good alternatives:
简明微积分(Concise Calculus [1],there is a western equivalence of it published by Dover [2])
MITOCW 18.01sc + 18.02sc (Opencourse)
Gilbert Strang's Calculus (never read it but he made a series of lectures on the essence of calculus which was excellent, so I assumed that his book must be great)

[1] https://www.google.com.hk/books/edition/Concise_Calculus/ZFEyDwAAQBAJ?hl=zh-CN&gbpv=0
[2] https://store.doverpublications.com/0486404536.html
 
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  • #14
@Leo Liu, #13
That is mostly a complaint about book publishing business practice, which makes sense but it is too widespread so is not limited just to Calculus textbooks nor just to the author, Stuart.
 
  • #15
Twigg said:
"Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations" (Grad. Texts in Math., 107) by Peter Olver.
I really like the topic of applying Lie groups to differential equations, so I purchased 'Equivalence, Invariants and Symmetry' by Peter Olver. 500 pages and I still don't know how to show that DE A is equivalent to DE B.
Twigg said:
I expect we'll see a lot of stat mech books in this thread. Good stat mech books seem to be a real rarity.
Related: I have Statistical Physics of Fluids from Kalikmanov. Bought it for .50 from the university library together with a dozen other books. Never looked at it again. If somebody thinks it's any good I'll send it to you (just pay the stamps). Hmmm... is there a bookswap on PF?
 
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  • #16
@bigfooted I hear ya. I took serious attempts at Olver's book 4 times over 5 years and each time I felt that the prolongation formulas were black magic. Shame too because it's such an attractive topic for physicists.
 
  • #17
dextercioby said:
It is the same Hecht who wrote a good book on Quantum Mechanics?
No, different Hecht. Didn't know that book BTW.
 
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  • #18
For the people talking about bad stat mech books, there is a good couple of stat mech books, Mehran Kardar's books in particular which are accompanied by a free online set of lectures. However they are pretty damn hard. I think Greiner's book is probably alright too but I haven't looked at it in depth.

Idk why stat mech books are always so bad, it doesn't seem to me like it is a particularly hard subject to write a book about.
 
  • #19
I'll say this about Hecht's optics book. When I took undergrad level optics with Hecht, he assigned manageable-sized weekly readings from his book (4th edition, the big one) that were not in line with the book's order and would frequently have us review and discuss insightful sections of the book in class. Definitely not standard teaching technique for physics, but honestly it was a great intro level class. Ironically, the reason for that was because Hecht didn't overload us with information. He knew the right parts of the book to use, and he paced it well.

Its not a book that's meant to be read cover to cover or a chapter at a time. You got to take it slow and really think through what's being said. So it can be a great book if your teacher understands this and cares. Or it can be a daunting book if you're self learning or you teacher doesn't care enough to structure the course properly.

That being said, I'm definitely biased.
 
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  • #20
AndreasC said:
For the people talking about bad stat mech books, there is a good couple of stat mech books, Mehran Kardar's books in particular which are accompanied by a free online set of lectures. However they are pretty damn hard. I think Greiner's book is probably alright too but I haven't looked at it in depth.

Idk why stat mech books are always so bad, it doesn't seem to me like it is a particularly hard subject to write a book about.
Well, I think it's a pretty tough task to teach statistical mechanics in the early curriculum. For me the main obstacle is to introduce the notion of entropy in an understandable way. I think the "little Reif" (Berkeley physics course, volume about statistical physics). Another great one is the book by Callen, though it has too much "phenomenological thermodynamics" in the beginning for my taste, but this is off-topic, because we should discuss bad books in this thread ;-)).
 
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  • #21
I second Stewart calculus. The examples are poor in my opinion. Derivations and theorems aren't rigorous. I believe it was pointed out by someone here that he uses circular reasoning in one of his 'proofs'. The problems are pretty dull. I strongly disliked using this book for my online calculus course. There are better options, but they are mostly put of print. It's a shame Apostol is do damn expensive, because it is my favorite calculus text. Courant would be if it's notation wasn't so old school.
 
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  • #22
vanhees71 said:
Well, I think it's a pretty tough task to teach statistical mechanics in the early curriculum. For me the main obstacle is to introduce the notion of entropy in an understandable way. I think the "little Reif" (Berkeley physics course, volume about statistical physics). Another great one is the book by Callen, though it has too much "phenomenological thermodynamics" in the beginning for my taste, but this is off-topic, because we should discuss bad books in this thread ;-)).
I've always wondered if another reason why statistical mechanics is tough to teach is because physicists, more often than not, are not properly introduced in their undergraduate curriculum in the basics of probability theory, of which statistical mechanics relies heavily on.

And writing a textbook on statistical mechanics without this background is a challenge that defeats many writers.

Again, this is just speculation on my part.
 
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  • #23
dextercioby said:
Why was Huang's book bad?
It is not possible to understand anything in it. But the version I had, it had a nice colour for the cover. The colour was so nice that it has to be spelled "colour" and not "color".
 
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  • #24
vanhees71 said:
Well, I think it's a pretty tough task to teach statistical mechanics in the early curriculum. For me the main obstacle is to introduce the notion of entropy in an understandable way. I think the "little Reif" (Berkeley physics course, volume about statistical physics). Another great one is the book by Callen, though it has too much "phenomenological thermodynamics" in the beginning for my taste, but this is off-topic, because we should discuss bad books in this thread ;-)).
I'm not sure it's true that stat mech is tough to teach. It's classical thermodynamics that is hard to teach, and stat mech that makes classical thermodynamics "easy". I mean, in stat mech there is only one concept :oldtongue: the partition function. If I'm not wrong, this was what Reif attempted to convey.
 
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  • #25
I feel like the statistics used in teaching stat mech is pretty simple. Just averages and standard deviations, plus the general idea of probability, no? Entropy is worth explaining in the book anyways.

Personally, I feel one of the bigger stumbling blocks is the derivation of the microcanonical ensemble which is often the first ensemble to be derived. The hyperspherical approximation is weird until you get it. I wonder if books should put off deriving Sackur-Tetrode until after they show readers the utility of the canonical and grand canonical. Let the readers feel empowered before hitting them with quantized phase space hyperspheres. I dunno, lesson planning is not my forte
 
  • #26
atyy said:
It is not possible to understand anything in it.
Are you speaking from your own perspective, or from the perspective of others?
 
  • #27
Demystifier said:
Are you speaking from your own perspective, or from the perspective of others?
Mine. I thought my opinion would be universally shared, but it gets 3.9/5 on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471815187/?tag=pfamazon01-20

The other book that I found terrible is Purcell, but that had two valuable things in it (nice derivation of radiation from an accelerated charge, and nice but wrong derivation of E and B fields using change of frame - I only learned that the second derivation was wrong years later from @vanhees71). Here my experience seems to be universal: https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/mrr/mrrtalk.html (well, Schroeder agrees, although the Amazon reviews he points to to back that up again give 4.2/5)
 
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  • #28
I think, not using Minkowski covariant formalism overcomplicates things in relativity unnecessarily. Usually introducing the adequate math leading to the most simple formulae helps to understand the physics (at least as far as theoretical physics is concerned). The example with the current-conducting wire many textbooks get wrong, not only Purcell (even in the Feynman lectures). The trouble there is that they don't use the relativistic version of Ohm's Law, which includes the self-consistent Hall effect. The corresponding analysis leads to the conclusion that the wire is electrically neutral when seen in the reference frame, where the electrons are at rest, while in the rest frame of the wire it is charged due to the Hall effect:

https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/relativistic-treatment-of-the-dc-conducting-straight-wire/
https://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~hees/pf-faq/relativistic-dc.pdf

The Lienard-Wiechert potentials are also much more lucid in the manifestly covariant formalism than in the usually presented (1+3) version of the 19th century:

https://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~hees/pf-faq/srt.pdf

Concerning the teaching of statistical physics (many-body physics in a broad sense) I think the trick is to use kinetic theory (Boltzmann equation). When you are forced to start from classical physics you introduce the description of a Hamiltonian system via the N-body distribution function and Liouville's theorem, which is not solvable for practical purposes and then coarse grain it by making the argument with the BBGKY hierarchy (see Landau Lifshitz vol. X, which has the most lucid derivation).

Then the true challenge is, how to introduce the idea of entropy, which is the key new quantity in statistical physics. One way is to give a solid introduction into probability theory augmented with information theory a la Shannon and Jaynes.
 
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  • #29
vanhees71 said:
Then the true challenge is, how to introduce the idea of entropy, which is the key new quantity in statistical physics. One way is to give a solid introduction into probability theory augmented with information theory a la Shannon and Jaynes.

What do you think of Atoms and Information Theory by Baierlein?

From the introduction
”My primary objective was to provide a specific alternative to the conventional developments of statistical mechanics, an alternative based on Richard Cox’s contribution to probability theory, Claude Shannon’s development of information theory, and Edwin Jaynes’ view of statistical mechanics.”
 
  • #30
I don't know that book yet. I'll see whether I can get it from the library.
 
  • #31
vanhees71 said:
I don't know that book yet. I'll see whether I can get it from the library.
Do you have a verdict?
 
  • #32
jasonRF said:
I thought statistical plasma physics, vol. 1 by Ichimaru was somewhat traumatizing and not very good. It seemed to have a lot of math and little physical insight. If it wasn’t required for a class I never would have spent so much time with it.

jason
I liked the book, but I did not have it for a class. I just supported some research with it. There was a lot of math. Not sure about the physical insight. I think this is probably not the right book for a first book in Plasma Physics. Many Universities use Chen, but I really did not like Chen.
 
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  • #33
caz said:
Do you have a verdict?
We are talking about Baierlein, Atoms and Information. I've glanced over it, and it looks very nice to me. I'm a bit biased though, because I like the information theoretical approach to statistical physics very much, because I think it gives a clear meaning to the somewhat complicated idea of entropy.
 
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  • #34
Demystifier said:
We usually talk about good books, but we rarely talk about bad books. And that is good.

But sometimes, we find that some book is so bad, so really bad, that we strongly want to tell this to the others. So I open this thread to inform others about science books which you find so bad that it needs to be told.

---------------------------

Here is my choice:
T. Banks, Modern Quantum Field Theory: A Concise Introduction
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521850827/?tag=pfamazon01-20

I've seen many textbooks on QFT, and for me this one is really the worst. From this book I was not able to understand even those things which otherwise I already understand pretty well.
Normally I read books too little, so still have no experience about the bad book, I just read those books which are really good, so I can't list any of bad book.
 
  • #35
BJU Press Physics Grade 12 Student Text
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The book is a bottom feeder and it is segregated from my real texts and other books. I actually keep it next to my fiction and literature books. It is written to prove the literal interpretations of the Christian Holy Bible and hence, tosses out all types of science, especially of radiological decay as well other science. The book often delves into biblical reference vs addressing issues that the book will (perhaps cannot) not acknowledge.
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Sadly, such books get published and the graduates from such program KNOW they have the best education available.
.
NO ONE is qualified to argue with God!
.
Who here, can argue with that?
.
Mike drop!
.
A perfect example of a Dunning Kruger exponetial function (Do I get to hog credit for a new term?)
 
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1. What is quantum field theory?

Quantum field theory is a theoretical framework that combines the principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. It is used to understand the fundamental interactions between particles and the forces that govern them.

2. What are the main concepts in modern quantum field theory?

The main concepts in modern quantum field theory include fields, particles, symmetries, and interactions. Fields are mathematical objects that describe the properties of particles, while particles are the building blocks of matter. Symmetries refer to the invariance of physical laws under certain transformations, and interactions describe how particles interact with each other.

3. What are the applications of modern quantum field theory?

Modern quantum field theory has a wide range of applications in physics, including particle physics, condensed matter physics, and cosmology. It is used to study the behavior of particles at the subatomic level, the properties of materials, and the evolution of the universe.

4. What are the challenges in understanding modern quantum field theory?

One of the main challenges in understanding modern quantum field theory is the complex mathematical formalism used to describe the theory. It also involves dealing with infinities and renormalization, which can be difficult to grasp. Additionally, there are ongoing debates and open questions about the interpretation and foundations of the theory.

5. How is modern quantum field theory related to other theories in physics?

Modern quantum field theory is closely related to other theories in physics, such as quantum mechanics, special relativity, and general relativity. It is also connected to other areas of physics, such as thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Many of these theories have been incorporated into modern quantum field theory to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the physical world.

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