The Feynman Lectures on Physics
I would add also the whole Feynman's Vol I https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html I believe one can't appreciate the whole subject enough without knowing that the electromagnetic forces are how the atoms "work", also producing "chemistry" and everything we see. To paraphrase Feynman, the electromagnetic forces also keep you from falling down through the floor. For the start: "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the…
Feynman lectures are excellent for physical intuition but if someone doesn't have a few years of practice with physics it will be difficult to get much out of it. Feynman also doesn't have a lot in the way of problem solving, even with the companion problem solving book. With that in mind, Landau/Lifshitz is an entirely different class. I'm a practicing astrophysical theorist and I would never claim to have grokked these volumes in anything nearing completeness. A serious post-PhD program of study can be undertaken to understand to the finer points of those books; this is a pursuit that…
FLOP and Susskind's Theoretical Minimum are similar in that they both aim to teach an intuition of theoretical physics, rather than training one to do calculate the solutions of particular physics problems. So, they are similar in that respect. The key difference that I noticed is that Feynman's intention is to explain nature, and he tends to avoid relying too heavily on the mathematics as part of that explanation. Susskind's focus is on raw abstractions themselves, often independent of the physical phenomena that are being abstracted. His intent is to exaplain the mathematics, and to give…
Funny you should ask... I took a lot of math classes all through college, but at every step I was reaching beyond my grasp, so I never had great understanding. And then after a few years, I forgot it all. So in my early thirties, I started over. Much more important than which text you use is your attitude, and a willingness to really walk through and understand the proof of a theorem, and a willingness to work through problems. Having said that, here's what I did: Go through the chapter in Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume I, where he starts with integers and goes through trigonometry…
Well if I could just impart one idea or concept it would be similar to Feynman's quote: >“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”…
For the last few years I've had the Feynman Lectures [1,2] sitting in my queue, and I've finally gotten around to starting them in the last week. It's been a fun ride so far, and it's been nice to have the time to digest the lessons without having to run off somewhere. It's also helped to have the MIT OCW lectures as a reference [3], in which I found a book title "Quantum Mechanics and Experience" [4] that I started reading as well and so far has been the most down-to-earth introduction to Quantum Mechanics that I've found. I highly recommend it. [1]…
When reading Feynman, don't miss the fact that the original audio recordings are now freely available [1], which, even speaking as someone with a strong preference for reading vs. listening or watching instructive material, shouldn't be missed. Feynman's sheer enthusiasm for the material is hard to get across in print. In the spirit of SICP, I also like Spivak's less conventional Physics for Mathematicians [2], but, as the title suggests, this assumes more, or at least different, mathematical prerequisites than most introductory mechanics texts. "Strong undergraduate maths background — at…
Grad school. It’s paradigmatic that physicists look at a problem and try to distill out the essence of it, you can see this at its best and its worse in The Feynman Lectures on Physics where Feynman seems to find a clever trick to make short work of a problem. He’d spent half a lifetime looking for this sort of trick and makes it look easy, one kind of student appreciates that, another kind thinks it is completely unreasonable to expect that they can pull a rabbit out of a hat on command. There is a dark art of solving hard problems in physics that isn’t really taught outside of grad…
Whoops, 5 year old. That rules out the Feynman Lectures (free online). So, I think that kids are most likely to be fascinated and engaged with real gizmo's. I started with little electrical gadgets. Forgot if I ever got a motor to spin. There are some fun experiments at IOP. https://www.iop.org/explore-physics Experiments do require supervision. Physics is a human activity. Another thing that got me excited was just looking at stars. That got me into astronomy and astrophysics. (and optics and optical engineering). One cool app I got my daughter was "Gizmos and Gadgets", a simulation…
Because they are written by mathematicians. In my case, when I have learned a mathematical topic, the intuition becomes obvious and the derivations/proofs seem to be much more important for gaining a complete understanding. I have gone up against texts with complete bewilderment, only to come back after gaining the intuition and found the extensions of the core premises and proofs provided by the text to be highly enlightening. Great math teachers understand the need to teach intuition. He wasn't a math teacher, but I think Richard Feynman is the pinnacle of this. See [1] to see how he…