51–60 of 170 posts
So happy to see the love for Griffith’s Intro to Electrodynamics. I know it gets dinged for not being sufficiently rigorous, but I’ve never read another math or science textbook that did as good a job of getting a beginner to truly understand the subject.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and I'd take it further. What I'd like to see more of in physics texts is presenting a problem before offering the solution. Too often you get what amounts to a laundry list of techniques and ideas, which are the components to the answers to hard problems, but the student isn't motivated to learn them. If you present the hard problem first, the student may flail around and realize: I need something to help with…
> If you present the hard problem first, the student may flail around and realize: I need something to help with this! I suffer from this. Sure, I'd like to learn physics, but what I don't want to do is learn all of it. Right now. Because what I'd rather learn is what I need to solve the problem I have. It's a silly problem, it's not real world, but it's my problem that I'd like solved. As I've grabbed my horse and l…
So happy to see the love for Griffith’s Intro to Electrodynamics. I know it gets dinged for not being sufficiently rigorous, but I’ve never read another math or science textbook that did as good a job of getting a beginner to truly understand the subject.
In what way is it not rigorous? I've never read it but it definitely seems interesting to have a "good" but non-rigorous science book. Does it just hand-wave over some things to get to other important topics?
I dropped out of Physics back in the day, because I loved computers a bit more, and now that I'm kind of fed up with computers I'd like to remove the thorn and do something like this. But I find that so much time has passed that I would need to brush up parts of my high school maths first, and this kind of discourages me before even starting.
I decided to start self learning theoretical physics late last year. I have been now studying physics every day for almost a year (before and after work). I did have to brush up on calculus and matrices but it came back very quickly (within a few days) after a 25 year gap so I'd say don't let that discourage you.
It’s a decent list but thermodynamics is introduced way too late in the list (after modern and quantum wtf) and fluid dynamics and fluid mechanics including aerodynamics is entirely missing. If you have a physics education (I have an engineering education) can you tell me if you can really get a physics degree without bumping into Bernoulli or Navier-Stokes? At least just to see the lay of the land.
Thermodynamics/statistical mechanics was taught as a junior level class at my undergraduate alma mater. During that year, students would take electrodynamics, classical mechanics, and statistical mechanics as separate classes in some loose order, although of course simpler versions of these topics would have been introduced in first year physics.
The lack of fluid mechanics also, unfortunately, tracks with my experience.
A point that's rightfully emphasized by the author: > Solving problems is the only way to understand physics. There's no way around it. This generalizes well to other fields. I don't want to discourage anybody from trying to educate themselves in a difficult field (be it physics or something else), but that's a very common and immediately visible problem with autodidacts. If you haven't worked through enough hard pro…
In college, I was always the first one out of my friends to “get” a concept, like fast Fourier transforms, anything with signal processing or even coding or any labs we had to do etc so I would spend time teaching them in the library. However I never did any of the exercises, mostly due to laziness and not arrogance. They would get A’s and I would get C’s and D’s. I emphasize this story to my kids because knowing isn…
It’s a decent list but thermodynamics is introduced way too late in the list (after modern and quantum wtf) and fluid dynamics and fluid mechanics including aerodynamics is entirely missing. If you have a physics education (I have an engineering education) can you tell me if you can really get a physics degree without bumping into Bernoulli or Navier-Stokes? At least just to see the lay of the land.
> they are and have been dreadfully underserved and underestimated by the academic physics community (who do not take them seriously because they aren’t studying at colleges and universities) This stuck out, pretty rigorous if all you want to satisfy your curiosity. If you want to actually apply any of the hard work you put in, you need a degree. I think that is the most interesting part of learning anything, applyin…
100% same, except computers bore me to death now. I would even be willing to go back to school at this point if it wasn’t tens of thousands of dollars.
A point that's rightfully emphasized by the author: > Solving problems is the only way to understand physics. There's no way around it. This generalizes well to other fields. I don't want to discourage anybody from trying to educate themselves in a difficult field (be it physics or something else), but that's a very common and immediately visible problem with autodidacts. If you haven't worked through enough hard pro…
Nowadays it's a lot easier when there are so many free materials from top school online. And stack exchange and reddit is available almost 24-7 if one ever has a question.