States, Waves and Photons: A Modern Introduction to Light

Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1970. Fine condition in a bright and shiny but only Good dust jacket. The rear panel of the jacket is missing two edge pieces that each measure approx. 1 inch by 2.75 inches. NO owner's name or bookplate. NOT a library discard. NOT a remainder. Sharp corners. Square and tight. All pages are fresh, crisp, clean and unmarked -- apparently seldom, if ever read. Illustrated with numerous diagrams. Equations. 7 appendicies. Bibliography. Index. Bound in the original dark gray cloth, with gilt-stamping over a black panel on the spine. Complete with dust jacket. From a 2007 review by dharmaraja: "5 stars. Seeking the overlap between wave optics and quantum mechanics. Optics ramified historically into three major paradigms: rays, waves, and photons. While exposing these three, the generic undergraduate textbook on optics can spare little space for the delicate issue of the transition between them. The thoughtful student who stops to think about it may sometimes notice that one must cross over a dark crevasse in passing from waves to photons. For example, I can mention a paradox concerning spin angular momentum. Quantum mechanics teaches us that the photon carries a spin of one unit parallel (or antiparallel) to its direction of propagation. But symmetry considerations in the wave picture imply that a circularly polarized infinite plane wave -- a common classical analog of a photon -- cannot carry any such component of spin angular momentum. The text of Joseph Simmons and Mark Guttmann is a thoroughly fresh and original approach to the theoretical foundations of optics at the undergraduate level. The special, distinctive focus here is on the quantum mechanical nature of light. While it does not get into the quantum field theory of photons, it moves in that direction by developing the Schrodinger equation of a single photon in free space. Although this book was published 37 years ago, nothing in it is obsolete because the authors stick to ageless fundamentals. This book was obviously crafted with great care and is a true gem -- it is lucid, concise, with pleasant, not-too-hard chapter ending problems, and well-designed, informative appendices. 4th year undergrads (in physics and math) and 1st year grad students should be able to understand it: the level is similar to that of the optics text by G. R. Fowles. But the scope is narrower than that of Fowles, or other generic optics texts, in that it is focused on: a) the analytical theory, and b) the free-EM field. Because of a) and b), two items are largely missing: a) the hardware of optics, such as lenses, microscopes, spectroscopes, and lasers, and b) interactions with charged particles, or, equivalently, the optics of material media (birefringence, etc.) It contains many standard topics that would be found in an advanced undergrad text, such as the matrix theory of ray optics, Fresnel-Kirchoff Diffraction theory, and conservation laws of energy and of linear momentum. As is typical of all topics in this book, I found that these familiar topics are handled in a fresh, elegant, and succinct way so it was not tiresome for me to encounter them again. There are many treasures waiting to be discovered in this book. I'll merely mention three of them: 1) a whole chapter devoted to the Stokes parameters; 2) another where the authors use the polarization states of a light wave as a springboard to develop much of the foundations of quantum mechanics--an amazing performance! ; and 3) the spin paradox I mentioned at the start of this review is beautifully resolved in the final chapter. Having read the book cover-to-cover, and having attempted most of the problems, I found, among its many other virtues, a very low frequency of typos or errors. I am sorry to see that it has gone out of print. Good people at Dover Pubs., please listen up: this is an outstanding candidate just crying out to become a reprint and join the illustrious ranks of Dove.…