In the preface to Aspects of Symmetry, his collection of lectures delivered at the Erice Summer School, Sidney, Coleman speaks of the years between 1966 and 1979, the span of those lectures, as “the period of the famous triumph of quantum field theory. And what a triumph it was, in the old sense of the word: a glorious victory parade, full of wonderful things brought back from far places to make the spectator gasp with awe and laugh with joy.”1 Since this is the perfect description of Zee’s book, I could stop my review here, but I realize I should give you a description of its contents, not simply of the feelings evoked by reading the book.
Quantum field theory arose in the late 1920s out of the desire to combine the new quantum mechanics with the classical view of fields as seen in the formulation of...
