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Comment by carterschonwald | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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