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Comment by dannylandau | Hacker News Reader

Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series?

P.S. No immediate relation to Landau (and family name is really Livshitz).

As the joke goes, one morning Livshitz was riding a tram to work, someone pushed him and he dropped his manuscript into the mud, ruining a few pages. When he arrived at the lab, he complained to Landau that he would have to spend the whole day rewriting the proof of a tricky theorem because the middle part was now gone, but Landau suggested simply to put "from which it is obvious that" there instead.

In undergrad I took a graduate class out of Calculus of Variations by Gelfand and Fomin [0] that went deep into the math of classical mechanics but assumed students already knew the relevant physics. I hadn't taken a proper classical mechanics class, and working through Volume 1 of Livshitz-Landau in parallel with the lectures helped to ground the material for me. A brilliant classmate who’s now a successful mathematical physicist had recommended the series.

Later I tried to learn Quantum Mechanics while taking a course on Operator Theory, but gave up on using Volume 3 of Livshitz-Landau because it was just too impenetrable. I ended up going with Sakurai instead.

I found Volume 1 to be beautiful read and felt like I was learning something profound. Volume 3 was beyond me. The only thing I'd say these books have in common with the Feynman Lectures is a dearth of exercises. This wasn't an issue for me reading Volume 1 of LL because that Calculus of Variations course had many exercises which I just wasn't in a position to appreciate without knowing more Physics.

> Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series?

Landau-Livshitz books are gradual level while Feynman Lectures are undergrad level physics course. They should not be directly compared to each other.

Another one worth mentioning is Theoretical Minimum by Susskind. It's not at the same level as Lev Landau though.

They are incredibly dense. Like, it assumes you are already an expert on the topic and you need a high level refresher.

Accurate. I had a immigrant Russian professor in undergrad QM whom provided no notes, I could barely understand anything he said, and he just said to use L&L as the course book when people asked for help. I spent hours trying to read it but it was utterly useless. Worst studying experience I ever had

The Feynman lectures are definitely easier to understand. I could pick something from them.

And more fun to read.

Course of Theoretical Physics is too "cold". It however seems more comprehensive. As it looks to contain more material.

Feynman was trying to teach the first three years of physics by mixing the splits between topics. It's far less comprehensive than L&L.

That book was often referred as Landavshitz among students. Fantastic series.

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