Statistical Physics: Statics, Dynamics and Remormalization
Leo P. Kadanoff
Leo P. Kadanoff
W-rld Scie-tific Publi-hing Company | 2000 | ISBN: 9810237588 | 450 pages | Djvu | 5,3 MB
The material presented in this invaluable textbook has been tested in two courses. One of these is a graduate-level survey of statistical physics; the other, a rather personal perspective on critical behavior. Thus, this book defines a progression starting at the book-learning part of graduate education and ending in the midst of topics at the research level. To supplement the research-level side the book includes some research papers. Several of these are classics in the field, including a suite of six works on self-organized criticality and complexity, a pair on diffusion-limited aggregation, some papers on correlations near critical points, a few of the basic sources on the development of the real-space renormalization group, and several papers on magnetic behavior in a plain geometry. In addition, the author has included a few of his own papers.
Summary: Charting the right direction.
Rating: 5
I would never, ever call this book a 'solid basis' for statistical mechanics--that's Landau, or Sommerfeld.
What Kadanoff does do, like other great theorists, is make the field seem real. For instance, Feynman's diagrams don't add anything new to the mathematics, but they set the idea into focus in a way that makes you think differently about the real world. Before Gell-Mann, chromodynamics was just a mathematical idea: reading him makes you think there's really particles. And who really understood polarization until reading Dirac?
Kadanoff does that for critical phenomena. Even when he covers the material in a uselessly glossy way, he sets the theory on its feet and opens up the idea for more work. I've gotten tons of ideas from reading him.
Summary: Charting the right direction.
Rating: 5
I would never, ever call this book a 'solid basis' for statistical mechanics--that's Landau, or Sommerfeld.
What Kadanoff does do, like other great theorists, is make the field seem real. For instance, Feynman's diagrams don't add anything new to the mathematics, but they set the idea into focus in a way that makes you think differently about the real world. Before Gell-Mann, chromodynamics was just a mathematical idea: reading him makes you think there's really particles. And who really understood polarization until reading Dirac?
Kadanoff does that for critical phenomena. Even when he covers the material in a uselessly glossy way, he sets the theory on its feet and opens up the idea for more work. I've gotten tons of ideas from reading him.
