The Dutch scientist Hendrik Kramers (1894-1952) was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century--and one of a mere handful who have made major contributions across the whole field. Physicists know his name from, among other things, the Kramers dispersion theory, the Kramers-Heisenberg dispersion formulae, the Kramers opacity formula, the Kramers degeneracy, and the Kramers-Kronig relations. Yet few people know more than the name, or recognize the full depth and range of his contributions. In this book, D. ter Haar seeks to change that. He presents for the first time anywhere a comprehensive discussion of Kramers's scientific work, and reprints twelve of his most important papers. The author shows us that Kramers's remarkable and diverse work makes him at least the equal of such celebrated physicists as Fermi and Landau. He takes us through Kramers's groundbreaking research in such subjects as quantum theory, quantum electrodynamics, statistical mechanics, and solid-state physics. The papers he reprints include Kramers's derivation of the dispersion formulae that led to Heisenberg's matrix mechanics; his classic paper on the Brownian-motion approach to chemical reactions; a pioneering paper on polymers; and a paper on renormalization, a concept first introduced by Kramers and now one of the basic ideas of modern field theory. This book will change how we view the course of twentieth-century science and will show that Kramers was indeed one of the masters of modern physics.
Following the Boltzmann-Gibbs approach to statistical mechanics, this new edition of Dr ter Haar's important textbook, Elements of Statistical Mechanics, provides undergraduates and more senior academics with a thorough introduction to the subject. Each chapter is followed by a problem section and detailed bibliography. The first six chapters of the book provide a thorough introduction to the basic methods of statistical mechanics and indeed the first four may be used as an introductory course in themselves. The last three chapters offer more detail on the equation of state, with special emphasis on the van der Waals gas; the second-quantisation approach to many-body systems, with an examination of two-time temperature-dependent Green functions; phase transitions, including various approximation methods for treating the Ising model, a brief discussion of the exact solution of the two-dimensional square Ising model, and short introductions to renormalisation group methods and the Yang and Lee theory of phase transitions. In the problem section which follows each chapter the reader is asked to complete proofs of basic theory and to apply that theory to various physical situations. Each chapter bibliography includes papers which are of historical interest. A further help to the reader are the solutions to selected problems which appear at the end of the book.
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