Applications of Classical Physics | Hacker News Reader

Applications of Classical Physics

pmaweb.caltech.edu

82 pointsnill040 comments

I will probably date myself with this comment, but in my highschool days there used to be this TV series called the Mechanical Universe produced by Caltech. It was so fantastically good, perhaps peak pedagogy for its time.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJddRABXqJ5h5G0dk...

I watched that series multiple times when i was in high school and early college. Really inspiring and the visualizations still live in my head. Unusually good production for an educational show. Set a new standard.

For those who would like a print version, this manuscript eventually got published as Modern Classical Physics https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691159027/mo...

I was weighing up (...) buying a copy of this the other day, in a physical bookshop. The thing was so big I couldn't actually buy it.

There has always been commentary that the size (over 1300 pages) of the General Rel book Gravitation by Meisner Thorne and Wheeler was done for demonstration purposes. Apparently, modern versions are only 2.5" thick which leads me to believe they must be on incredibly thin paper. I remember it being about 4-5".

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/06911...

Maybe tome size a Kip thing?

The thing with MTW is that it's so big that it's quite hard to really mull over it (for me at least).

it's a book that I can imagine reading a lot in a very quiet world (i.e. basically a dorm or library before phones or computers) but it's very hard to actually get my teeth into it without that.

Yeah, unless you're taking a class like ph236 covering the material it's just absurd.

I hadn't realized it, but it looks like this new book is for ph136 the junior level (1st year grad) general rel prep class.

https://www.its.caltech.edu/~esp/ph136b/text.html

"General relativity for the gifted amateur" just came out by the way. I suspect an instant classic. I am very rusty so shall be going through it.

Interesting that they changed the author order to put Kip Thorne first... marketing?

I just looked through the diffraction chapter and some chapters I'm much less familiar with. This is an incredible ~graduate level text for these subjects. I've been looking for something like this for a while! Thanks!

For an idea of how far the average US physics education has been dumbed-down in the past three decades, I doubt a 3rd year US-educated physics graduate student could pass a test on any of the chapters.

We are victims of our success.

I don’t think this is very accurate. Classical fluid dynamics is a dying art, yes, but classical mechanics and electromagnetics are still a huge part of the curriculum.

With or without a LLM "partner"?

The vast majority of US grad students already pass tests on chapters 1-9 (the ones that are taught) before they even begin their "true" graduate career (aka their "masters"). Most graduate E&M (Jackson) and Thermo/Stat (Landau) mech classes cover their individual topics to an even greater level of detail than these materials.

As for the uncovered subjects, it turns out quantum mechanics occupies a large space of the "new physics" that graduate students are trained to do.

There are definitely an incredible amount of utility and knowledge to be gained from the classical field theories, and obviously many outstanding and new problems that I think need more attention as well. At the same time let's not understate the utility of quantum mechanics that most grad students are specializing in.

You are speaking out of turn.

sounds like you haven't visited a top-ranked physics department in a while

Not really dumbed down, just that it prioritizes quantum physics instead of classical. One can debate whether this is a good set of priorities but it's flippant to say a curriculum focused on quantum mechanics is dumber than one focused on fluids and elasticity/continuum mechanics.

A lot of modern research in classical mechanics is typically covered by applied math and/or mechanical engineering departments, sometimes also applied physics or engineering science. Magnetohydrodynamics is relevant for a lot of proper academic physicists, but by no means all of them. Just a consequence of how academia specialized, for better or worse.

Skimmed through chapter 1. That sounds like the way I was taught this subject in high school, nothing revolutionary. Not sure why they're talking so much about its brilliance

You learned about stress tensors and PDEs in high school?

Interesting that relativity is included here; to me it's one of the main things separating modern physics from classical.

I think in modern physics "classical" often means "not quantum", rather than "pre-modern".

Typically non-relativistic and non-quantum is called "Newtonian". Classical is just for anything which is not quantized, and so far no one knows how to quantize general relativity.

Classical means "not quantum." It doesn't mean "not relativity." Relativity is a classical discipline.

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