494 pages, 9x6 inches
Oct 2001 Hardcover
ISBN 1-58949-005-3
US$88

 
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This book brings together the various papers and lectures of Professor Willis E. Lamb, Jr. (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 for his precise measurement of what came to be called the Lamb shift) on the fundamental, fascinating, and fashionable subject of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, to which Professor Lamb began to bring his original insights since he started publishing his papers in the filed in 1969. In a detailed editorial annotation on the `Scientific Work of Willis E. Lamb, Jr.’ (based on extensive conversations with Professor Lamb), Jagdish Mehra, a distinguished historian of modern physics, who has published extensively on the historical development of quantum theory, provides a survey of Professor Lamb’s diverse contributions to the various fields of fundamental physics and the context in which they were made. 

The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics by Willis E. Lamb, Jr., provides all students of quantum mechanics, physicists, philosophers and historians of sciences, new insights in the understanding of quantum mechanics by one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, and the editorial annotation offers a fascinating portrait of the life and science of a great man.
 

0 Foreword
1 An Operational Interpretation of Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics
2 Von Neumann's Reduction of the Wave Function
3 Remarks on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
4 Sequential Measurements in Quantum Mechanics
5 Theory of Quantum Mechanical Measurements
6 Schrodinger's Cat
7 Quantum Chaos and the Theory of Measurement
8 Lectures on the Quantum Theory of Measurment I
9 Lectures on the Quantum Theory of Measurment II
10 Quantum Theory of Measurement  I
11 Quantum Theory of Measurement  II
12 Matter-Field Interaction in Atomic Physics and Quantum Optics
13 Classical Measurements on a Quantum Mechanical System 		14 Corrections to the Golden Rule
15 Computational Approach to the Quantum Zeno Effect: Position Measurements 
16 Suppose Newton Had Invented Quantum Mechanics
17 Anti-Photon
18 The Borderland between Quantum and Classical Mechanics
19 Classical Theory of Measurement: A Big Step Towards the Quantum Theory of Measurement
20 Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics
21 Super-Classical Quantum Mechanics
22 Super-Classical Quantum Mechanics: The Best Interpretation of Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Annotation The Scientific Work of W.E. Lamb, Jr.
The Scinetific Bibliography of Willis E. Lamb, Jr.


 
The author (left), Willis Eugene Lamb Jr., was born in Los Angeles, California. He earned a Ph.D. in physics under J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1938 at the University of California, Berkeley. Lamb has taught physics throughout his entire career: at Columbia University; Stanford University; Harvard University; Oxford University; Yale University; and the University of Arizona. He has been a prolific researcher, who has been at the forefront of research in fundamental physics during the past over six decades. For his precise measurement of the fine structure in hydrogen (the level shift between 2S1/2 and 2P1/2 in early 1947, since then called the Lamb shift, with his graduate student Robert Retherford at Columbia University), he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955, which he shared with Polykarp Kusch (who had made a precise measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron). Lamb's contributions to physics are highly honored and justly celebrated: it was his measurement of the Lamb shift that led to the renormalized quantum electrodynamical theories of Schwinger, Feynman, Tomonaga, and Dyson.


The editor, Jagdish Mehra, was trained as a theoretical physicist in the research schools of Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgan Pauli, and later came under the strong influence of P.A.M. Dirac. He is the author or editor for many books including The Historical Development of Quantum Theory (with H. Rechenberg, 1982-2000), The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner (with A. S. Wightman, 1993-2000), The Physicist's Conception of Nature, (1972), The Quantum Principle: Its Interpretation and Epistemology (1974), The Beat of a Different Drum (1994), and Climbing the Mountain (with K. A. Milton, 2000). Professor Lamb and Professor Mehra have been close friends for a very long time.