The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics is an influential monograph on quantum mechanics by Paul Dirac, which was published by Oxford University Press first 1930. At the same time the book was one of the first textbooks on quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is developed by Dirac from basic principles. Separate chapters are devoted to perturbation theory (Chapter 7), scattering theory (Chapter 8), systems with multiple identical particles (Chapter 9), radiation theory (Chapter 10), Relativistic electron theory ( Chapter 11, with Dirac equation ) and quantum electrodynamics ( Chapter 12).
Dirac was in Cambridge between 1925 and 1927 one of the founders of the then new quantum mechanics. His book was based on a series of lectures on quantum mechanics, Dirac gave in Cambridge. The illustration in his book was the same generally considered in appearance as a masterpiece, so in the comments of Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein, preferably in questions of quantum mechanics moved later to rate, but also in expressions of many later physicists like Freeman Dyson and Rudolf Peierls. Dirac stayed in his lectures on quantum mechanics and later closely to his book.
From Dirac were a total of four ( or five) supervised conditions, the 2nd edition in 1935, then in 1947 ( 3rd edition ), 1958 ( 4th edition ) and 1967 ( revised 4th edition ).
The second edition - completed in a sabbatical year in Princeton - was less mathematical and more readable than the first edition, while retaining the basic structure, but had a reputation for most students except the most talented heavy diet as before and as a textbook for the practical instruction in quantum mechanics very suitable.
From the third edition he used his formalism of Bra- ket vectors, which he first introduced in 1939, but was common only with the third edition of Dirac's book. A special role is played the delta function ( it is dedicated to paragraph 15 ) in Dirac 's mathematical formalism, and this was particularly due to its quantum mechanics textbook known ( it is an example of later mathematicians distributions called generalized functions ).
In the 4th edition, 1958 ( where he had worked for a large part of the year 1956 ), the Chapter quantum electrodynamics ( Chapter 12) completely revised ( in particular the possibility of pair production of electron and positron were taken into account ), and in the revised 4th edition 1967 again added.
Recent developments, for example, of quantum electrodynamics in the 1940s ( for Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Tomonaga were awarded the Nobel Prize ) were not considered by him - he kept basically little of these developments ( renormalization ) as they in his opinion in the theory occurring infinities would be swept under the carpet.
In paragraphs 32 ( The action principle) treated he also path integrals and in the following paragraphs (The Gibbs ensemble ) is the density matrix, where it refers to John von Neumann.
He treats the harmonic oscillator creation and annihilation operators, and similarly with ladder operators, he also deals with the quantum mechanics of angular momentum. Fermi's Golden Rule can be found in Chapter perturbation theory (p. 180). Many of the concepts in the book were a few years earlier created by Dirac himself, the so-called Second quantization and the Fermi -Dirac statistics, but also his transformation theory ( with which he showed the equivalence of the Heisenberg and Schrödinger formulation of quantum mechanics) and the correspondence of quantum mechanical commutation relations and Poisson brackets.
The book contains 314 pages on his ( 4th edition 1967) not a single diagram or drawing. It also contains no exercises. There is also no historical discussions or explanatory statements or motivations through experiments. In Chapter 6 (elementary applications, from page 136 in the 4th edition ), the first chapter after the sections dealing with the presentation of the fundamentals of the theory, only the harmonic oscillator, angular momentum and electron spin and the hydrogen atom ( and selection rules ) is discussed. There are few references to literature - in the final chapter (p. 311), he refers to the presentation of applications on Walter Heitler 's quantum theory of radiation ( Clarendon Press 1954) and his own Lectures on Quantum Field Theory ( Academic Press 1966).