Quantum Field Theory, as Simply as Possible

Zee does a superb job of explaining quantum field theory. My quantum physics courses date back 60 years, and I have never had a course on particle physics. However, I feel I have some grasp of the subject after reading Dr. Zee's book. Here's my thanks to him, and my hearty recommendation of his book to anyone interested in learning something about quantum field theory.

This book is truly a breath of fresh air among the popular physics books. Most popular books delve into string theory or quantum loop gravity. While these books make for a light reading I am pretty sure the reader comes out with nothing on the other side.Zee's book fills a great gap. If you're an ambitious student who knows quantum mechanics and some electromagnetics , this book will help you bridge the gap to quantum field theory. Or if you're like me with an engineering background who also knows quantum mechanics (path integral formulation and the Dirac equation), this is a perfect book for you to transition into QFT. I have tried reading QED/QFT books on my own for self study and couldn't decipher any of the material in it although I have the background necessary. After reading Zee's book, all that changed. Suddenly now looking through these books I started understanding bits and pieces and I intuitively know what the author is trying to convey.Just so you don't get the wrong idea, this book is not a textbook. It's still a leisurely reading. It is not heavy on equations at all, but Zee does not shy away from writing the Lagrangian of QED. This is a perfect balance and is exactly what I needed. I found his approach and physical explanations refreshing and intuitive and he made me confident that I can tackle a subject like Yang Mills theory after reading his book; a subject I never understood no matter how much I read about it. I also found his casting of general relativity into a field theory very transparent and not only that ; his very simple explanation for the metric made me grasp what general relativity is really about !Bear in mind that QFT is an advanced subject. Zee does explain the background necessary for you (quantum mechanics and special relativity) before delving into field theory, but please, this book is not intended for you if you don't know any mathematics/physics at all. This is the problem with the 1 and 2 star reviews I see. You do need some prior physics background to be able to enjoy this book. Don't blame the author for this, you are not his intended audience.Overall, a gem of a book. I wish physicists would write more books of this kind. If I could give 10 stars out of 5, I would.

If the author is reading these reviews, I would like to thank him sincerely for writing this book. I am a social scientist by training. My field of study has nothing to do with quantum field theory. But I have always regretted not having taken the other path when I was 18, so finally I ordered this book once the popular science books were no longer satisfactory: I needed to understand the intuitive logic that informs the formulas and all the calculation that goes into explaining the behavior of an electron. Alas, this is THE book. Prof. Zee is highly entertaining too, and my husband was really wondering why I was LOL'ing while reading a book called Quantum Field Theory. I took this book to a camping trip with me. My son spilled water all over it so I ordered a second copy and I am dedicated to keep it dry and clean this time! I cannot recommend this book highly enough--if you have some background in calculus, things will make more sense. I now know what those Feynman diagrams mean and what Dirac did! Thanks a million for writing this book!

What a masterpiece! Witty, informative, and fascinating. Technical notes at the end of chapters are very welcome. I wish everyone did that.I do data analytics / data science professionally, and being able to pick up a book and understand what’s happening at the frontiers of physics (which has always been my passion that I unfortunately did not follow) is to me incredible. Very thankful to the author for producing this masterpiece.

Zee’s “semi-popular” introduction to QFT is definitely a five-star book if you have the right level of background knowledge of physics, and I am giving it five-stars because I’m right in what I think is Zee’s target audience. I’m a retiree who was a physics major 45 years ago, but whose career was in an unrelated field and who also did not take a course in QFT when I was in school. If you weren’t a physics major, you can get all the background you need by viewing and carefully following Leonard Susskind’s “theoretical minimum” video lectures, which consist of about half a dozen series of ten two-hour lectures each. These lectures presuppose some knowledge of elementary calculus.What I think you need to extract from Susskind’s lectures or an equivalent to maximally enjoy and understand the knowledge embedded in Zee’s book (and I presume the “theoretical minimum” book series that I have not read but that I believe follows Susskind’s lectures would also suffice) is 1) at least some understanding of the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics, 2) comfort with special relativity and classical field theory, 3) exposure to undergraduate-level non-relativistic quantum mechanics, and 4) a hint of how gauge theories work. Nevertheless to be fair, Zee offers a well-articulated introduction to all these things in his book, although at a level that’s barely mathematical (and most of what math he offers is put into chapter endnotes), and my prejudice here is that a mathematical introduction to these concepts is what is really needed for good comprehension of the QFT concepts that are based on them.The point is that if you do already have these prerequisites you are more likely to be able to read between the lines in Zee’s book in a way that lets you learn more of what you need to put you in a position to take the next step and actually read a textbook on QFT, which is something that I, and probably many people in the target audience for this book, would like to be able to do but who have been too intimidated by the jump to a real QFT textbook like Zee’s own Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell. Textbooks like these assume a strong math background and tend to skip steps in derivations.Yet even though I know I am going to need a refresher in things like contour integration to tackle a real QFT textbook, I believe I will now have much more of a shot at success when reading such a textbook after reading this new popularization of Zee’s. For example, thanks to his new book I now understand better the relationship of QFT path integrals to the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures in QM, I now see the underlying quantum-mechanical basis that explains why the Lagrangian works in classical mechanics, I now better understand what mass amounts to in the context of the theory, and also better understand the role of the Dirac equation, the differences between real and virtual particles, why and where perturbation theory is required, and many other things. So Zee’s book has inspired me to giving a real textbook (probably “Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur” rather than Zee’s more difficult “Nutshell”) a shot.So Zee’s new book was an ideal read for me. Those who have actually studied real QFT would likely find it trivial. What is less clear to me is how little physics or math background you could have and yet still enjoy this book. You certainly don’t need to know how to do an integral, but those who have no sense of what an integral is, or even a complex exponential, would probably get a little lost. Nevertheless, I strongly commend Zee for addressing a largely unoccupied segment that lies between between typical popularizations and textbooks.