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physics books |
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Physics Books
 Knowing nothing about physics has not prevented me from buying quite a few physics books, even quite advanced ones. I buy them with the best of intentions: "Ah, Chandrasekhar's classic text, The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes! What a marvellous subject...and here, it's set down on paper what this stuff is really about!" (Now, flipping though the text)—"I must have it. Let's buy it now and begin an earnest study of it at once..."Once taken home, such a book would next take its place amongst other unread physics books. Occasionally I might pick one of them up, see if it made any sense to me, and then I would put it down again. Certainly little actual learning took place in these activities. Why did I learn nothing? Almost certainly because I've never advanced beyond browsing, to actual problem solving. In mathematics, computer science, or engineering problems, I've always jumped immediately into concrete problems, software, or whatever. Not so in Physics. Clearly that has to change if I'm actually going to learn anything. Therefore I'm going to concentrate on books that will actually help me work on actual exercises and problems and start moving toward solving them. I'll consider myself successful if I ever reach the point where I'm able to contrive my own line of physics research and work on it with the same satisfaction that I find in Math and Computer Science problems. I don't actually know if the books I have are proper for that, so a natural first step might be to assemble these books and see what I have. On second thought, that's going to be really boring, collecting books together and typing in their names into this web site. Instead, I'll just pick one. One book I have on my shelf is called problem book in relativity and gravitation, by Alan P Lightman, William H. Press, Richard H. Price, and Saul A. Teukolsky. Might as well start there. |