Description
In addition to his ground-breaking research, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is known for a series of highly praised texts on various aspects of physics, combining exceptional physical insight with his gift for clear exposition. Describing the foundations of modern physics in their historical context and with some new derivations, Weinberg introduces topics ranging from early applications of atomic theory through thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, transport theory, special relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and quantum field theory.
This volume provides the basis for advanced undergraduate and graduate physics courses as well as being a handy introduction to aspects of modern physics for working scientists.
At the time he wrote this book, his last, Prof. Weinberg was generally considered the greatest living theoretical physicist, and rightly so. At a time when most people his age are far into retirement, he was— as seen here — delighting in getting to re-do derivations by the likes of Einstein and Fermi, and making them stronger and more general. However, we need some background as to what the term “modern physics” means in physics education. At the end of the 2nd World War, 1945, as physicists and physics students returned to the universities, textbooks had to be written to cover the developments in physics from 1905 to the late 1940s or early 1950s. These books were titled “Modern Physics,” although “20th Century Physics” would have been a far more accurate label. Typically they covered special relativity (1905), the pre-quantum era (1910 – 20), were alas very thin with genuine quantum physics (1925), ignored quantum field theory (1930s)— the actual most important development of the century— and sketched out aspects of atomic, molecular, solid-state, nuclear (1930s) and the very beginnings (1950s) of particle physics. Today the texts are not very different, so that “modern physics” now refers to physics roughly a century old!!
What Weinberg did here is to write a text that goes over in great detail the most important developments from the last few decades of the 19th Century, up until the development and applications of quantum field theory. The level of sophistication and complexity of detail is often nearly overwhelming, and as a result the book doesn’t fit into the spectrum of classes that a student might take in his or her last two years of undergraduate work, or beginning graduate work. Specifically, Weinberg covers early thinking about an atomic description of matter, the development of thermodynamics and kinetic theory of gases, the beginnings of quantum ideas, special relativity, actual quantum physics (circa 1925), nuclear physics, and relativistic quantum field theory! Weinberg’s notation, as usual in his physics monographs, is often very nonstandard, so that his important quantities are so loaded with huge numbers of superscripts and subscripts that the fonts dwindle to microscopic levels that were a great challenge to my elderly eyesight.
As another example, he avoids the universally-adopted bra-ket formulation of state vectors in Hilbert space, replacing it by a very clumsy and inelegant mess… it’s as if he didn’t have certain mathematical symbols available on his computer. The level of mathematical sophistication is enormously high, far beyond what the normal physics undergraduate student sees even at a very good university. I can almost hear Weinberg chuckling— he was my colleague here at UT Austin for many decades— as he sets up and tackles an integral that would send deep terror into the soul of anyone who is not supremely mathematically talented. The book has almost no diagrams, but they would certainly have helped students in comprehending how to do the many contour integrals that are encountered.
I think the best audience for this thoughtful and insight-filled volume is professional physicists. Let a master show you the details you didn’t get in either your undergraduate or graduate physics education. He has many very deep thoughts to share with readers, within nearly every topic he presents.
The work is the ‘Tour de Physic’ by Weinberg. An excellent introduction into modern (theoretical) physics, formatted in Weinberg-fashion. This book is proof of his insightful legacy, and gladly he wrote it. Any serious physicist or apprentice should train with it.
The hardback quality is excellent.
It should come as little surprise that Steven Weinberg has written another winning exposition, suffused as it is with his many years worth of wisdom and insight (acquired through teaching and research). As I have alluded to in other reviews, my first encounter with Weinberg occurred 1977, his ‘The First Three Minutes’ especially its mathematical supplement. My second encounter, with study of his General Relativity and Cosmology (allowing time for me to hone prerequisites). That book was, and remains, a revelation to me. Then came his Quantum Theory of Fields (1995), and suddenly that topic made sense (the “why is it that way” kind of sense). As the years have progressed, I have made a deliberate attempt to study as much of Weinberg as I could, which brings me to his final text: Foundations of Modern Physics (the hardcover is sturdy, attractively and well-produced):
(1) Not one to shy from historical ruminations, Weinberg provides some background to whet the appetite. Along the way, keep your eyes open for Enrico Fermi and Willard Gibbs (Gibbs, in regards to the proof and generalization of H-Theorem (page 35) and Fermi, in reference to alpha-decay (page 235). If historically more motivated, read Weinberg’s book: To Explain The World, especially his technical notes.
(2) Mathematics is used to great efficacy and in interesting manner (symmetry, dimensional analysis (page 60), power series expansion (page 49), inequalities (page 36). Calculus, in Weinberg’s hands, becomes a sight to behold (I get the impression he truly enjoys using Calculus).
(3) Sometimes, an opinion makes its way into the prose: “The Majorana alternative seems to me a more economical and plausible view.” (page 250, regards neutrinos). Read: “It is the introduction of the concept of probability into physics that creates an asymmetry between past and future.” (page 37).
(4) Note: Max Born gets his due (equating one quantum postulate to another–see page 143, and top of page 145, also page 179) and through Born’s exposition Atomic Physics (I add: many prerequisites can be located there). Weinberg refers to Born’s appendix 33 (footnote, page 66). Enrico Fermi’s “masterpiece of scientific exposition,” Thermodynamics, is also referenced (page 24).
(5) I highlight the exceptional chapter on Relativity. Read: “It is a general rule that if the time-component of a four-vector vanishes in all coordinate systems, then the whole four-vector vanishes.” (page 112) and “General Relativity is a theory of the gravitational field, a quantity that keeps track of departures from inertial frames.” (page 102). Minkowski diagrams are absent (Mermin is good at describing those–see, Space and Time in Special Relativity).
(6) I highlight a section regards rotations (Read: “we would not want the rotation to change the total probability,” pages 152-154). I highlight sections on charged particles in electromagnetic fields and gauge transformations (pages 195-198, and gauge invariance will recur). Brief, yet illuminating. You eventually arrive at Feynman diagrams (page 268), but in true Weinberg fashion, figures, diagrams, or pictures as pedagogic ploy, are scarce.
(7) We are reminded: “the wave-function is not a field–it is a representation of a physical state.” (page 251). We are reminded: “the spin operator has nothing to do with positions and momenta.” (page 154). Words of wisdom abound. There is a separate index for names and subjects. There are footnotes and a bibliography (take note: Landau and Lifshitz, Fluid Mechanics). 28 interesting problems for involvement concludes the book (#17: “suppose the electron has spin 3/2 instead of 1/2….what would you expect…”).
(8) In conclusion: My opinion is to utilize a combination of Weinberg’s ‘Foundations’ in conjunction with his ‘Lectures on Quantum Mechanics’ and as prelude to his opus of Quantum Theory of Fields. By all means, study his ‘Gravitation and Cosmology’ updated with his tomes on ‘Cosmology’ and the terse, but illuminating: ‘Lectures on Astrophysics’. Good texts do not have to be voluminous, as Weinberg shows us.
I would recommend this book as an introduction for graduating seniors with proficiency in calculus and for under graduates heading to a physics or astrophysics graduate education. This book will serve well as reference material for the suite of a graduate physics education. For high school graduates, it can serve them well as a preview of what they will face in higher level courses..
It’s not a text so much as a condensed reference to the thinking behind and derivations of the most important information and equations in physics. But if you need it, you’ll find it here. Should have put a copy of this book on Voyager, except it hadn’t been written yet.
And pair this with Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics for a real entertaining introduction to modern physics…