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The free physics textbook

motionmountain.net

35 pointszkz9 comments

Flipping through it the book seems a bit lacking in substance? It is more like a picture book or encyclopedia, like "look, there all sorts of strange phenomena in physics", without being very helpful for understanding. For example, the chapter "classical mechanics" is a mere 16 pages, and contains sections like "free will".

If I find the time to read 1600 pages of a physics book, I think I'll rather approach the Feynman Lectures again. On the other hand, they also seem quite verbose at times - maybe some better physics book can be suggested?

Edit: the Feynman lectures are great, of course, a great joy to read. But they are a lot of text, too.

This is a self-study book, the crux of it is that text is interweaved with hundreds of qualitative problems. I know of no other modern conceptual physics book I could recommend for interested 14 year old.

I don't know, it just seems more like a management summary than a real textbook. Maybe that is just the thing to tip a teen's interest, but I remain skeptic.

Question for all here, if one has a strong pure math / CS background, whats a good collection of texts for building up to a solid understanding of modern theoretical physics?

Roger Penrose's A Road to Reality :

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...

i've looked at it, and i'm not convinced that it does a good job explaining the math the reader doesn't a priori know.

Its one thing to go from mathematical physics to theoretical physics, its another thing to go from pure math with a theoretical computer science bent to mathematical physics and theoretical physics. Does this difference make sense, or am I missing some observation? (i don't know enough to know which is more likely)

You need this: http://mitpress.mit.edu/SICM augmented by e.g. Lanczos Variational Principle (the closest to a platonic ideal of exposition for this didactically elusive topic) and various lecture notes for classical mechanics courses http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html. From there move to Byron & Fuller Mathematical Physics and only then you may question where to next, that's the bare minimum of theory in physics. Baez & Muniain "Gauge Fields & bla bla" has very good narrative on one offer what to do after, Sethna Statistical Mechanics on another. Speaking of bare minimums there's a youtube lecture series by Susskind "Theoretical Minimum of Physics" or sth.

If you have a 'strong pure math background', chances are you won't like theoretical physics. Physics is all about positive thinking, results and moving forward. As a result the 'theories' aren't theories in the mathematical sense, to a mathematician they're just a bunch of equations thrown together. (My point is, once something 'works', physicists aren't interested in making it mathematically rigorous.) There are no definitions, clearly stated theorems and proofs, instead we have 'physical insight'. They always say the language of physics is mathematics. My take is that physics borrows the syntax of mathematics, but not the semantics. That may not be an exact statement, but hey, I'm a physicist myself =)

You will never ever be able to have a 'solid understanding' of modern theoretical physics in the sense you have a solid understanding of complex analysis, noone does. (A notable exception is Relativity.)

Nevertheless, some books. Feynman lectures on physics (3 volumes): to learn the 'physical insight' part. Really really good. Landau (many volumes): I personally don't like Landau, but it's pretty standard and comprehensive.

Has anyone read the structure and interpretation of classical mechanics? Is it good? It's free as well. I only studied first year physics. Sharing any experience reading that would be appreciated. :)

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