ABSTRACT

One is specialization, often unconscious or at least unstated; the author covers the physics of metals, or of semiconductors, or bands and bonds, or some other subject fairly completely, and neglects the rest of the field. A second solution is that chosen by Seitz as a follow-up to his marvelous 1940 text: to collect rather than select, and to publish series of reviews by different authors on their own specialties. At the advanced monograph level this is all that can be done, but it is no help to the student entering the field. It is hard to give the idea an adequate name; equally good would be renormalization, if that didn't have a different meaning in field theory, or, perhaps best of all, model-building. Remaining illustrative material which might be included—on magnetism, superconductivity, superfluidity, and metal-insulator transitions—is omitted at this time. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.