Eugene D. Commins is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a faculty member since 1960. His main area of research is experimental atomic physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and a Fellow of the AAAS, and he has been awarded several prizes for his teaching, including the AAPT's Ørsted Medal in 2005, its most prestigious award for notable contributions to physics teaching. He is the author (with Philip H. Bucksbaum) of the monograph Weak Interactions of Leptons and Quarks (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Mathematical preliminaries; 3. The rules of quantum mechanics; 4. The connection between the fundamental rules and wave mechanics; 5. Further illustrations of the rules of quantum mechanics; 6. Further developments in one-dimensional wave mechanics; 7. The theory of angular momentum; 8. Wave mechanics in three dimensions: hydrogenic atoms; 9. Time-independent approximations for bound state problems; 10. Applications of static perturbation theory; 11. Identical particles; 12. Atomic structure; 13. Molecules; 14. The stability of matter; 15. Photons; 16. Interaction of non-relativistic charged particles and radiation; 17. Further topics in perturbation theory; 18. Scattering; 19. Special relativity and quantum mechanics: the Klein-Gordon equation; 20. The Dirac equation; 21. Interaction of a relativistic spin ¿ particle with an external electromagnetic field; 22. The Dirac field; 23. Interaction between relativistic electrons, positrons, and photons; 24. The quantum mechanics of weak interactions; 25. The quantum measurement problem; Appendix A: useful inequalities for quantum mechanics; Appendix B: Bell's inequality; Appendix C: spin of the photon: vector spherical waves; Works cited; Bibliography; Index.