This book contains a revised and expanded version of the lecture notes of two seminar series given during the academic year 1976/77 at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Calgary, and in the summer of 1978 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Technical University Clausthal. The aim of the seminars was to present geometric quantization from the point of view· of its applica tions to quantum mechanics, and to introduce the quantum dynamics of various physical systems as the result of the geometric quantization of the classical dynamics of these systems. The group representation aspects of geometric quantiza tion as well as proofs of the existence and the uniqueness of the introduced structures can be found in the expository papers of Blattner, Kostant, Sternberg and Wolf, and also in the references quoted in these papers. The books of Souriau (1970) and Simms and Woodhouse (1976) present the theory of geometric quantization and its relationship to quantum mech anics. The purpose of the present book is to complement the preceding ones by including new developments of the theory and emphasizing the computations leading to results in quantum mechanics.

The geometric approach to quantization was introduced by Konstant and Souriau more than 20 years ago. It has given valuable and lasting insights into the relationship between classical and quantum systems, and continues to be a popular research topic. The ideas have proved useful in pure mathematics, notably in representation theory, as well as in theoretical physics. The most recent applications have been in conformal field theory and in the Jones-Witten theory of knots. The successful original edition of this book was published in 1980. Now it has been completely revised and extensively rewritten. The presentation has been simplified and many new examples have been added. The material on field theory has been expanded.

The geometric formulation of autonomous Hamiltonian mechanics in the terms of symplectic and Poisson manifolds is generally accepted. This book provides the geometric formulation of non-autonomous mechanics in a general setting of time-dependent coordinate and reference frame transformations.

Approach your problems from the right It isn't that they can't see the solution. It end and begin with the answers. Then, is that they can't see the problem. one day, perhaps you will fmd the final question. G. K. Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown 'The Point of a Pin'. 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R. Van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the 'tree' of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geo metry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical progmmming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to fIltering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces.

In the last decade, the development of new ideas in quantum theory, including geometric and deformation quantization, the non-Abelian Berry''s geometric factor, super- and BRST symmetries, non-commutativity, has called into play the geometric techniques based on the deep interplay between algebra, differential geometry and topology. The book aims at being a guide to advanced differential geometric and topological methods in quantum mechanics. Their main peculiarity lies in the fact that geometry in quantum theory speaks mainly the algebraic language of rings, modules, sheaves and categories. Geometry is by no means the primary scope of the book, but it underlies many ideas in modern quantum physics and provides the most advanced schemes of quantization.

This volume presents various aspects of the geometry of symplectic and Poisson manifolds, and applications in Hamiltonian mechanics and geometric quantization are indicated. Chapter 1 presents some general facts about symplectic vector space, symplectic manifolds and symplectic reduction. Chapter 2 deals with the study of Hamiltonian mechanics. Chapter 3 considers some standard facts concerning Lie groups and algebras which lead to the theory of momentum mappings and the Marsden--Weinstein reduction. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the theory and the stability of equilibrium solutions of Hamilton--Poisson mechanical systems. Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the theory of geometric quantization. This leads, in Chapter 8, to topics such as foliated cohomology, the theory of the Dolbeault--Kostant complex, and their applications. A discussion of the relation between geometric quantization and the Marsden--Weinstein reduction is presented in Chapter 9. The final chapter considers extending the theory of geometric quantization to Poisson manifolds, via the theory of symplectic groupoids. Each chapter concludes with problems and solutions, many of which present significant applications and, in some cases, major theorems. For graduate students and researchers whose interests and work involve symplectic geometry and Hamiltonian mechanics.

This book introduces mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers to a new, coherent approach to theory and interpretation of quantum physics, in which classical and quantum thinking live peacefully side by side and jointly fertilize the intuition. The formal, mathematical core of quantum physics is cleanly separated from the interpretation issues. The book demonstrates that the universe can be rationally and objectively understood from the smallest to the largest levels of modeling. The thermal interpretation featured in this book succeeds without any change in the theory. It involves one radical step, the reinterpretation of an assumption that was virtually never questioned before - the traditional eigenvalue link between theory and observation is replaced by a q-expectation link: Objective properties are given by q-expectations of products of quantum fields and what is computable from these. Averaging over macroscopic spacetime regions produces macroscopic quantities with negligible uncertainty, and leads to classical physics. - Reflects the actual practice of quantum physics. - Models the quantum-classical interface through coherent spaces. - Interprets both quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. - Eliminates probability and measurement from the foundations. - Proposes a novel solution of the measurement problem.