By 苏剑林 | April 01, 2016
The work on the solutions to the exercises continues to progress with difficulty. This is version 0.5. Compared to version 0.4, I have skipped Chapters 8 and 9 for now and prioritized the exercises for Chapters 10 and 11, which cover the statistical mechanics sections.
Chapter 10 contains 10 exercises, and Chapter 11 actually has no exercises. Although they seem few, the difficulty of each exercise is quite high. The main content of these two chapters involves using path integral methods to calculate partition functions in statistical mechanics, which is inherently a grueling task. Combined with Feynman's descriptive style, it is easy for readers to get a general idea but very difficult to carry out the actual calculations. In fact, I only managed to complete these exercises by referencing a significant amount of material, both in Chinese and English.
Although I say they are "completed," I have only finished 9 out of the 10 problems. I am still confused about Problem 10-3; the result I obtained differs from the one Feynman provides, so I could not proceed further. I am mentioning this here in the hope that knowledgeable readers can provide some guidance.
Additionally, while Chapter 11 on the variational method has no exercises, the primary calculations (such as calculating first-order path integrals) are actually contained within the explanations and exercises of Chapter 10. Therefore, one must thoroughly understand Chapter 10 to properly read Chapter 11. On a side note, I believe my humble work "The Extremal Principle of Estimating Sections—An Elementary Version of the Variational Principle" is very helpful for beginners learning the variational principle.
Download: Solutions to Exercises for "Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals" V0.5.pdf
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