In only 150 pages, not counting appendices, references, or the index, this book is one author's perspective of the massive theoretical and philosophical hurdles in the no-man's-land separating the classical and quantum domains of physics. It ends with him emphasizing his own theoretical contribution to this area. In his own words, he has attempted to answer: 1. 'How can we obtain the quantum dynamics of open systems initially described by the equations of motion of classical physics (quantization process)? 2. 'How can we retrieve classical dynamics from the quantum mechanical equations of motion by means of a classical limiting process (dequantization process)?' However, this monograph seems overly ambitious. Although the publisher's description refers to this book as 'an accessible entree', we find that this author scrambles too hastily over the peaks of information that are contained in his large collection of 272 references. Introductory motivating discussions are lacking. Profound ideas are glossed over superficially and shoddily. Equations morph. But no new convincing understanding of the physical world results. The author takes the viewpoint that physical systems are always in interaction with their environment and are thus not isolated and, therefore, not Hamiltonian. This impels him to produce a method of quantization of these stochastic systems without the need of a Hamiltonian. He also has interest in obtaining the classical limit of the quantized results. However, this reviewer does not understand why one needs to consider open systems to understand 'quantum-classical correspondence'. The author demonstrates his method using various examples of the Smoluchowski form of the Fokker--Planck equation. He then renders these equations in a Wigner representation, uses what he terms 'an infinitesimality condition', and associates with a constant having the dimensions of an action. He thereby claims to develop master equations, such as the Caldeira--Leggett equation, without use of a Hamiltonian. However, his procedure is seriously flawed. For example, he considers a case of anomalous Brownian motion using a Kolmogorov stochastic equation, and two cases of Brownian motion, the first with a constant force and the second with a linear force. In each of these three cases, his alleged solutions for a function F(x,p,t), which he wishes to interpret as a probability density, are not in fact solutions of their respective evolution equations. The author, in order to interpret these as probability densities, appears to have obtained the correct solutions of these equations, but then has normalized each of them with a time-dependent function, so that their integrals over the whole phase space remains unity for all time. However, an integration of the original equations over phase space demonstrates that an integral of their solutions over the whole phase space must be time-dependent. Despite the poor editing of this monograph, in which errors in equations abound, and in which the dimensionality of quantities is occasionally incorrect, this reviewer's interest in this subject was not extinguished. We are thus thankful for its extensive bibliography.
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Nov 20, 2017
Igor A Batalin + 1
Open Access
