Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 The best physics book since the Principia? July 14, 1998
henrique fleming (Sao Paulo, SP Brazil)
55 out of 60 found this review helpful
Dirac's masterpiece surely needs no reviews, but I dare to write one for younger people. This is it! The first chapter alone would be worth of the price. Wonderful insights, not to be found anywhere else, in almost every page. Supremely elegant, yet natural and self-contained. The whole way of writing physics was transformed by this gem of a book. Learn, at Chapter V, what led Feynman to his version of Quantum Mechanics. Schwinger started here too (at fourteen!). Unparalleled.
Don't miss reading Dirac June 23, 2005
A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
The first edition of this book (including bras, kets and all that) was published when the author was 28. Ponder that a bit, you hot-shots who would scrimp on the stars you give this book.
I agree with an earlier reviewer that the first chapter alone justifies buying the book. I've long kept this book on my shelf to remind myself about how beautifully expository prose can be written, and how far I have to go to equal it.
BTW, in my experience it's possible to learn a lot from it about QM even as a first book on the subject, if you know some linear algebra.
An Underappreciated Classic March 25, 2004
K. Ferrio (TUCSON, AZ United States)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
First, a disclosure: this was my first QM text. That's right. I picked it up as a sophomore in electrical engineering. This could easily have nipped any hope for a career in research. Rather, I was immediately taken by the undeniable elegance of the exposition. (I distinctly recall my first impression of the discussion on page 9 which is exceptionally lucid on the subject of what QM does and does not tell us about quantized fields, because this is something I had already struggled with unsuccessfully.) Moreover, Dirac reduces QM to what it really is: a few remarkable postulates about how Nature is; and a whole lot of linear algebra. Dirac was arguably a mathematician first and asserted, elsewhere, that it is more important that out theories have beauty than truth in the physical world. Anyone who can at least entertain this notion may gain much from this often overlooked classic, largely free of the pedagogically distracting baggage of wavefunctions. One reviewer has noted that the notation is archaic or cumbersome; I must kindly demur.
A great book, hard to digest July 13, 1998
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
Dirac's book on quantum mechanics is a classic in the field, but one finds that the master cannot stoop low enough for most students. A very difficult but rewarding book.
Impressive May 3, 2006
VTepes
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As anothers reviewers state don't expect to learn QM from this book -actually I think Cohen-Tannoudji is one of the best for this purpose-, but if you know already some quantum mechanics you'll find a very clear and elegant introduction of the dirac formalism of QM. I like it very much.
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