The Theoretical Minimum
theoreticalminimum.com
theoreticalminimum.com
Ramamurti Shankar has recently written a couple of books that are also excellent and very friendly (every derivation explained etc., lots of background). Anything by R. Shankar is great, really (i.e. his quantum book and the 'basic training in math' book).
As an engineer with greater dreams, I bought the English translation of his books off Amazon based on recommendations, then promptly gave up my pursuit of theoretical physics.
Curious if anyone else has tried to self study the Landau series. (If so, please say you were as unsuccessful as I was.)
I think the same quality of efficiently getting straight to the point, without extraneous digressions or any hand holding, which makes them so highly valued by working physicists (at least in my experience) also makes them completely useless for self study without the necessary background knowledge. The Landau books aren't pedagogical, in any modern sense of the word. They're simply a concise, self-contained and rather well structured treatment of basic theoretical physics, almost unparalleled in their scope.
Don't let them turn you off physics, though. You were simply unlucky in that you picked perhaps the worst possible famous textbooks for your particular goal. If it helps, most physics undergrads hate them with a passion too.
"Mechanics" is a second year undergraduate textbook here. We only used it during the first semester, and didn't have a set textbook for the second. Goldstein and Arnol'd were favourites.
"The Classical Theory of Fields", "Quantum Mechanics" and "Statistical Physics" are all recommended reading in third year, but they're not the main textbooks for their modules.
I'm in Ireland, in Trinity College Dublin. The way the course (Theoretical Physics) as a whole is taught is rather odd compared to other universities. For various historical reasons, the theorists are staff of the mathematics department rather than the physics department. For other historical reasons, the Theoretical Physics (TP) course is separate to the Physics course and its teaching is split evenly between the Mathematics and Physics department.
Due to the way the TP course is structured, we take a lot of rigorous and proof based maths in the first two years. Single- and Multi-variable Real Analysis, Calculus on Manifolds, Complex Analysis, Group Theory, and of course Linear Algebra are all covered rigorously. Fourier Analysis and ODEs are covered also, but less rigorously and more focused on applications. All of these modules are shared with the pure mathematics students.
The Physics students on the other hand, are required to take another subject during their first two years. Most choose chemistry. Because of the additional subject they only take non-rigorous equivalents of some the above. Multivariable/Vector Calculus instead of Analysis, no Calculus on Manifolds at all, I'm not sure about complex analysis, no group theory, mostly computation based linear algebra. Their Fourier Analysis and ODE course are much the same as ours.
So over the course of the first two years, the mathematical maturities of the TP students and physics students diverge significantly simply due to the topics that are studied.
This, and the fact that theorists are in the maths department, has resulted in a lot of modules that would traditionally be the realm of the Physics department alone, being duplicated. The physics department teaches the physics students a certain topic, while the maths department teaches the TP (and pure maths) students the same topic, usually more in depth as there is less need to delve into the mathematical machinery behind it when the students are often already familiar with it.
For example, next year the modules I'll be taking in the maths department are "Classical Field Theory", "Electrodynamics", "Quantum Mechanics" I & II, and "Statistical Physics" I & II. The Mechanics modules I mentioned earlier were also taken in the maths department.
In 4th year, the gap widens further, as there is no way at all for physics students to take GR or QFT (as far as I can recall). These are only taught by the maths department, which also offers to TP students, depending on the year, modules on Algebraic Geometry, Group Representations, Lie Groups & Algebras, Differential Geometry (a prerequisite to GR here) and others.
And I don't disagree with you. I think the split between the theorists in the maths department, and the experimentalists in the physics department (and, in turn the split between TP and Physics; not to mention outside pressures) has resulted in a course that's perhaps a bit too focused on experimental topics.
In particular I found the Boolean logic -> Quantum state vectors progression quite interesting, and the emphasis on the history and how you can build formalisms was particularly interesting. Also, it gives you problems (like a "real" textbook) but they are written in such a way that the text is more like a story but you learn the required maths to solve the problems.
I loved reading these books while I was in high school, bored with the math-less "physics" we were being taught.
> A number of years ago I became aware of the large number of physics enthusiasts out there who have no venue to learn modern physics and cosmology. Fat advanced textbooks are not suitable to people who have no teacher to ask questions of, and the popular literature does not go deeply enough to satisfy these curious people. So I started a series of courses on modern physics at Stanford University where I am a professor of physics. The courses are specifically aimed at people who know, or once knew, a bit of algebra and calculus, but are more or less beginners.
The concern trolling, the backhanded smug attitudes, maybe police your own houses first--I'm looking at you higher education. You've become something so unrecognizable and just so incredibly rotten.