The Story of Spin 1st Edition by Sin-itiro Tomonaga (PDF)

Description

All atomic particles have a particular “spin,” analogous to the earth’s rotation on its axis. The quantum mechanical reality underlying spin is complex and still poorly understood. Sin-itiro Tomonaga’s The Story of Spin remains the most complete and accessible treatment of spin, and is now available in English translation. Tomonaga tells the tale of the pioneers of physics and their difficult journey toward an understanding of the nature of spin and its relationship to statistics. His clear unfolding of the tale of spin is invaluable to students of physics, chemistry, and astronomy, and his description of the historical development of spin will interest historians and philosophers of science.”This piece of the history of physics will provide excellent and exciting reading. . . . It also provides the personal touch of an expert in the field that is so often lacking in the physics literature. I recommend it very highly.”—Fritz Rohrlich, Physics TodaySin-itiro Tomonaga was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Sin-Itiro Tomonaga (1906-1979) was a Japanese physicist whose influential work in the development of quantum electrodynamics earned him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As an autodidact, books are the means to my gaining knowledge. And when you’re in the hands of a master–someone who knows his material intimately and who has a physically real view of theory–it’s a great experience. Tomonaga takes you on a journey towards the inner workings of the nucleus. Along the way, he gives you the history of how the notion of “spin” came about, the principal players and moments, and pointing to some rather startling conclusions. He begins with atomic spectra, orbits, degeneracy, giving you the important experimental works that helped develop the theory, and slowly builds up a coherent theory of spin and the mathematical expressions for it. The startling results have to do with Schroedinger’s expectations for a real-world analog of quantum phenomena, an expectation that, via Dirac’s treatment of a many-body fully relativistic system,Tomonaga says has been met.Quite a journey. Lots to learn. And with a ‘master’ in hand, quite an enjoyable trek.

⭐What a beautiful book! It’s derived from a collection of Tomonaga’s lectures, and his love of simple statements and clear style really make them flow. I came away from this book understanding much more about field quantization, isospin, and the Thomas theory than I ever had before.Oka’s translation is clear and colloquial — a justified act of love. And as a renowned physicist in his own right, he ensured that the physics was not mangled in translation — the prose about the physics is clear and correct (at least to my understanding). I don’t know if he had to clean up any equations, but I didn’t notice any typos in them either. Also, this may be a minor point, but I thought the equation numbering scheme with the subscripts was really helpful.This book is not intended for general audiences; if the reader isn’t familiar with Hamiltonians or quantum mechanics he will gain relatively little from it.

⭐I expected to read why electrons have spin 1/2. The reason seems to be Dirac derived it, but that is not good enough for me. Dirac also gave weirdness like negative energy. I read many books covering this question and they all fall short. It seems to be just a decision made by comity. The g factor and the m sub s factors cancel out, so why bother with all that. For the free electron, If charge diffracts, it could not have a center and therefore not have a spin. The stock answer is something like: spin is not visualizable. I think they are all wrong about spin, especially for free electrons and photons. Photons are all wrong anyway. I showed that by experiment at unquantum.net . So the whole subject is very confusing and full of mystery, and I think it is just plain wrong, but many physicists will say I am wrong. Well I know they are wrong from my experiments. Also, winning a Nobel prize does not make the author a god.

⭐If you can’t read full out sentence notations of all symbols the author will be like,,, and that precisely what I ment by ….. There fore ……….. This you clearly should know by now due to …….. He’s like showing off almost if I could read notation I probably would say he is completely showing off

⭐Very difficult read.As much biography as science.

⭐A pity that the Quantum Mechanics textbooks written by Tomonaga are seldom referred to these days. Thus, a small consolation that the 1974 lectures are made widely available (finally, in English translation). I let Tomonaga tell us how he learned Quantum Mechanics: “In 1929, there was no textbook on quantum mechanics, most studying was done by looking up original papers, one after the other.” (page 224).It would be difficult to locate a student (or professor) who learns any topic today utilizing the method (studying original papers one after the other). What a pity ! Tomonaga has more wisdom to disseminate:(1) “The problem of whether Schrodinger’s psi-function is a wave in the configuration space, or a wave in three-dimensional space worried us when we were third-year undergraduate students.” (page 221). That was 1928. That remark recalls Heisenberg’s lectures, 1930: “I have attempted to make the distinction between waves in space-time and the Schrodinger waves in configuration space as clear as possible.” (preface). It is now 2019 and that issue still eludes an enormous number of students and professors.(2) Are you searching for a succinct introduction to quantum fields ? Search no more, for in his lecture eight Tomonaga presents an interesting excursion through that landscape. Read: “you will see that the concept of covariance plays a role here.” (page 144) Then, we read this: “physical quantities at different points do not commute, from this follows the vexing situation that two different physical quantities at two different points cannot be measured simultaneously.” (page 146).(3) Remember Thomas Precession ? That is, perhaps, a topic ignored in many an elementary course these days. It is there in Taylor and Wheeler: SpaceTime Physics (an almost-solved exercise #103, pages 169-173). It is here in Tomonaga, lecture eleven (pages 184-214), read: “the result obtained by Thomas’ theory and that obtained by quantum theory, not only look the same, but can be shown to be completely identical if we translate it into the former by the correspondence principle.” (page 214). That is quite a remarkable conclusion ! In any event, if you want to learn more, study Taylor and Wheeler (exercise #103), then return to study lecture eleven. Tomonaga is replete with formulas (not so, Taylor and Wheeler). Also, he presents preliminary to lecture eleven in lecture three: of Biot-Savart, the discussion on page 33.(4) Thus far, I have recommended Tomonaga for alluding to an accurate portrayal of the so-called wave-function, an introduction to quantum fields plus a review of Thomas precession. Initially, one turns to this book due to its concentration upon the topic of its title: spin. Read: “we do not think of self-rotation, or rotation, when we hear the word spin.” (page 42). Tomonaga raises a good point, unfortunately that point has fallen on deaf ears in too many courses ! We are carried from spin of electrons, atomic spectra (lectures one and two) to molecules (lecture four) onward to:(5) Helium and Ferromagnetism (lecture five). You are given the game plan: “solve the equation without spin, next solve the Schrodinger equation with spin but without spatial motion and determine eigenvalues, finally we consider the interaction between spatial motion and spin.” (page 85).Now, that is how you solve a complex physics problem !(6) You get a rapid-fire introduction to Dirac and transformation theory. You really get much more than that. Lecture three is a synopsis of the quantum principles of Pauli and Dirac. Read: “this work of Dirac’s is definitely the work of genius, however, I believe it was very much stimulated by Pauli’s previous work.” (page 60). You will learn that “analogy” has been instrumental throughout (For instance: Dirac page 97, Fermi page 178, Heisenberg on page 221).(7) Concluding: If your inclination is to follow Tomonaga’s method, of following the research papers one after the other, the annotated bibliography here (pages 237-246) is a wonderful place to begin. If you are inclined to a review of principles of special relativity and quantum mechanics, Tomonaga will give you that. If you are inclined to an excursion into the land of quantum fields, he offers a beautiful introduction.Finally, for “spin,” in all its variety of manifestations: historical, conceptual, experimental and theoretical,Tomonaga is where you want to begin !

⭐Great book

⭐La question du spin est mystériuse dans beaucoup d’ouvrages de physique parfois trés remarquables. Cette ” histoire” est un vrai chef d’oeuvre même si le point de vue du mathématicien est absent. A recommander absolument.!!!It paints an amazing picture of some very interesting physics!

⭐Very nice book!! For physics’s lovers!!!

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