Tuesday, March 17, 2020

 The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky (2013, ISBN 978-0-465-07568-3)

Subtitle: What You Need To Know To Start Doing Physics.

The one thing I learned from this book was-- There is No Royal Road to Physics.

In 227 pages the books covers a lot of territory!  Mathematics-- Spaces, Trigonometry, Vectors, Differential Calculus, Integral Calculus, Partial Derivatives, Vector Fields-- DIV, GRAD & CURL. That is a lot and doesn't include the Physics!

Physics-- Introduction, Motion, Dynamics, Energy, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian Mechanics, Poisson Brackets, Electric and Magnetic Forces, Newton's Laws and Kepler's Laws. And a whole lot more!

I doubt you can do Physics after reading this book, unless you are a genius. But you might get a feeling for whether or not this stuff interests you. If you are interested I suggest you get a proper College Physics book (for example Theoretical Physics by Georg Joos ISBN 978-0-486-65227-6) and study for real.  The book Classical Mechanics by H.C.Corben and Philip Stehle (ISBN 978-0-486-68063-7) covers many of the same topics (not the Math, they assume you know that) but it isn't for people who don't know the basics. Another book is Classical Mechanics with Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control, An Intuitive Introduction by Mark Levi (ISBN 978-0-8218-9138-4)


Classical Mechanics, The Theoretical Minimum by the same authors is just the UK version of the above book. (ISBN 978-0-141-97622-8)

I got these books for Christmas 2019.


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