A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics - Third Edition Ian D. Lawrie CRC Press 2013 693 pages softcover ISBN 9781439884461 monograph advanced undergraduates and above Dr. Manuel Vogel, TU Darmstadt and GSI Darmstadt,
[email protected] Following the first edition in 1990 and the second edition in 2002, we now have the third edition of 'A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics' by Ian Lawrie. It has been extended by a chapter on quantum gravity which focuses on loop quantum gravity, and several chapters have been extended by sections about topics which have gained prominence over the past few years such as dark energy and dark matter, thermodynamics of black holes, cosmological perturbations, massive neutrinos and of course the Higgs boson. It is still a 'Grand Tour' in the sense that it takes the reader by the hand and walks through all the important fields within theoretical physics. It is 'Unified' in the sense that it treats all these topics within one approach, using a common notation and nomenclature. It may be the biggest merit of this book to make the effort of pointing out and using the interconnections between fields which are commonly treated separately. All of these formal and conceptual similarities which are pointed out help in understanding the way theoretical physics works. Correspondingly, the individual chapters are strongly interlinked with references across fields within physics one normally would not see a relation between. The content is organized as follows: 'Introduction: The Ways of Nature', 'Geometry', 'Classical Physics in Galilean and Minkowski Spacetimes', 'General Relativity and Gravitation', 'Quantum Theory', 'Second Quantization and Quantum Field Theory', 'Relativistic Wave Equations and Field Theories', 'Forces, Connections and Gauge Fields', 'Interacting Relativistic Field Theories', 'Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics', 'Phase Transitions', 'Unified Gauge Theories of the Fundamental Interactions', 'Solitons and So On', 'The Early Universe', 'An Introduction to String Theory' and 'Gravity and Quantum Mechanics'. There is a short summary of the most important equations and findings, called 'Some Snapshots of the Tour', and an appendix with 'Some Mathematical Notes', 'Some Elements of Group Theory', 'Natural Units' and 'Scattering Cross-sections and Particle Decay Rates'. It is a common feature of all these chapters to point out the main ideas and mathematical concepts along which a description of the respective physics works, rather than going into full detail about the consequences. The text is fully referenced to journal articles and has a bibliography with books for further reading, marked with letters which indicate their entry level. Although this book is more of a broad overview of theoretical physics rather than an introduction, it may be regarded as a textbook on the advanced undergraduate level, also by the fact that it has end-of-chapter problems. Solutions to those can be found on the accompanying website http://www.unifiedgrandtours.org. A number of books from the third edition have been misprinted and feature several minor errors, the website clarifies this and tells how to identify a misprint. If you find a copy which claims in its glossary of mathematical symbols that the Kronecker delta symbol is defined on page 500, then maybe you wish to ask for a correct copy. Leaving this small problem aside, this is an excellent insight into theoretical physics at a level which is accessible for advanced undergraduates and above. It is brilliantly written and deserves a full recommendation. The paper and the print are excellent, however, owing to the nearly 700 pages of text, this book would have deserved to be a hardback.
