"Quantum Physics of the Solid State: an Introduction" Draft foreword:
26/09/03 If only this book had been available when I was starting out in
science! It would have saved me countless hours of struggle in trying to
apply the general ideas of the standard solid-state text-books to solve
real problems. The fact is that most of the texts stop at the point
where the real difficulties begin. The great merit of this book is that
it describes in an honest and detailed way what one really has to do in
order to understand the multifarious properties of solids in terms of
the fundamental physical theory of quantum mechanics. University
students of the physical sciences are taught about the fundamental the-
ories, and know that quantum mechanics, together with relativity, is our
basis for understanding the physical world. But the practical
difficulties of using quantum mechanics to do anything useful are
usually not very well explained. The truth is that the application of
quantum theory to achieve our present detailed understand- ing of solids
has required the development of a large array of mathematical tech-
niques. This is closely analogous to the challenge faced long ago by
theoretical astronomers in trying to apply Newton's equations of motion
to the heavens -they too had to develop a battery of theoretical and
computational techniques to do cal- culations that could be compared
with observation.