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- In case if any Physics learner finds this useful: Susan Rigetti's list is great if you are planning to do a late life PhD in Physics but not if you are re-learning it on the sideline of normal career as a hobby.
I've found many hard-core Physics textbooks to be off putting. Because the syllabus and its progression makes it seems like we are jumping from one special formula to another and there's just so much to learn! I was trying to search for a physics book that will try to cover as much ground as possible in fewer ideas and mental models. Roughly similar to Elon's idea that knowledge is a semantic tree and one should focus on trunk and big branches first.
Thomas A Moore did this experimental syllabus / series called "six ideas that shaped Physics". Each textbook takes one idea like "conservation laws constrain interactions". It's an excellent series, each book is relatively short and has amazing explanation. Especially look out for 2nd edition because later editions were probably "mainstreamed" by editors / publishers. The series is great choice for self learners. It uses non-standard notation and terminology at places to get the point across effectively so maybe not a great textbook lol.
2 standout examples for me : the first unit starts from the idea of interactions -> change in momentum -> to talk about change in kinetic energy. This motivates the idea of work done from first principles instead of directly throwing a definition "force . displacement". The unit on electromagnetic fields similarly has a beautiful discussion to motivate why one would use the ideas of curl and divergence.
- I should probably write this up more formally somewhere. But have a look, and it would be cool if you'd give me credit somewhere if you use these notes in your own stuff (I'm Steuard Jensen, and I'm a professor at Alma College). For each course below, the books are listed in roughly my order of preference. This is far, far from being every book for each course or even every popular one, but it's a start.
Intro Physics (Mechanics, E&M, waves, etc.):
* Six Ideas That Shaped Physics, by Tom Moore: Conservation laws first, and a nice conceptual approach (and can incorporate "modern physics" along the way).
* Matter and Interactions, by Chabay and Sherwood: Integrated VPython programming, and uses "true" relativistic mechanics right from the start (and quantum's built in, too).
* Physics for Scientists and Engineers, by Randall Knight: As close to a "traditional" intro book as you can get while still paying attention to physics education research. It's very good, though I feel like the latest edition has veered back a bit to a bit more traditional order, perhaps to make it smoother for old professors to switch.
Uncertanity/Error Analysis: (Essential for understanding experimental physics)
* An Introduction to Error Analysis, by John Taylor: Such a beautiful little book!
"Modern Physics": (Is a class whose content mostly ends before 1950 really "modern"?)
* Six Ideas That Shaped Physics (Units R and Q), by Tom Moore: A very nice first introduction to both special relativity and quantum physics. Might need some supplemental content if you have time for more advanced quantum/nuclear stuff.
[* Special Relativity, by Tom Helliwell: I learned out of this, and it was very good. I haven't taught out of it.]
[* Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles, by Eisberg and Resnick: I learned out of this, but haven't taught out of it. Comprehensive.]
Intermediate Classical Dynamics: (I haven't taught this one!)
* ?Classical Mechanics, by John Taylor: I've heard very good things about this one.
[* Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, by Thornton and Marion: I learned out of it. It was fine.]
Intermediate Electromagnetism:
* Introduction to Electrodynamics, by David Griffiths: Truly excellent introduction to analysis of electric and magnetic fields using vector calculus and partial differential equations.
[* ?Classical Electromagnetic Radiation, by Heald and Marion: I learned out of this. Not my favorite book, but it did the job.]
Intermediate Quantum Mechanics:
* A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, by John Townsend: Inspired by Sakurai's graduate text, Townsend starts by studying spin and Stern-Gerlach experiments in depth using Dirac bra-ket notation, and then progresses to time evolution and position space. The chapter on the path integral formulation is fun but optional, and there's good stuff on perturbation theory and scattering and some hints toward field theory. (This may work best if students had a strong "Modern Physics" course first that studied wavefunctions in some depth.)
[* Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, by David Griffiths: I haven't used this myself. An excellent quantum book with a more "traditional" organization, starting with wavefunctions and only later talking about Dirac notation and spin.]
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics:
* An Introduction to Thermal Physics, by Daniel Schroeder: A fantastic, multi-pass blend of statistical mechanics and classical thermodynamics. It starts with basic classical definitions of thermal concepts, then introduces explicit state counting in medium-sized systems with the help of Excel, then discusses classical thermodynamics in depth, and finally goes into a full discussion Boltzmann factors and statmech.
* Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics, by Frederick Reif: This was (for me) the least bad of the books that I used to teach myself undergraduate statmech while I was in graduate school. (I foolishly arranged to avoid the class as an undergrad.)
- [I'm a physics professor, for what it's worth, and I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to find a good textbook for this.]
For folks with a programming background, I suspect it would be hard to do better than Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood. (Someone already mentioned this elsewhere in the comments here.) It makes substantial use of Python code in the text and problems, and (partly enabled by that) it takes a delightfully modern approach that discusses the true (relativistic) formula for momentum (etc.) very early on. I haven't taught out of it yet, but I've been very tempted.
I'm currently teaching the intro course using Tom Moore's Six Ideas that Shaped Physics series. His approach is a little quirky at times, but usually for good reasons. I like it a lot.
Those are both purely introductory texts (though both cover topics up through "modern" physics: relativity and basic quantum phenomena). Beyond that, well, that's a bigger question.
- Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics is one of my favorites. It upends the traditional order of topics in an intro physics class: it starts with conservation laws rather than F=ma, both because they're more fundamental (you're not going to use F=ma in quantum mechanics, but you'll sure use energy) and because students taking calculus concurrently will have learned about derivatives there by the time you get to acceleration and really need to start understanding them. Lots of other pedagogically novel features, too.
Another favorite of mine that might be especially interesting to the HN crowd is Chabay and Sherwood's Matter and Interactions text. One key feature is its tight integration of simulations using "VPython", which students start to use within the first few weeks of class. That makes it viable to have students study realistic forces rather than just the simplest cases. (E.g. adding air resistance to projectile motion is just one more line of code, rather than requiring a course in differential equations.) That also makes it more reasonable for their book to give true equations from the start (like the equation for relativistic momentum rather than just p=mv) and then state the more familiar forms as approximations.
Randall Knight's Physics for Scientists and Engineers is a much more standard text than those two, but it's still worlds better than most traditional texts that I've used: it changes the old standards in smaller ways, but still incorporating lots of research-based improvements. (Knight's little book /Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching/ was a great introduction to Physics Education Research for me when I first started teaching, too.)
Eric Mazur, one of the real leaders of the Physics Education Research community, wrote a book not long ago called /Principles and Practice of Physics/. I haven't had a chance to really go through it in detail yet to get a feel for everything that makes it unique (one big structural change from tradition is that he focuses on students getting rock solid on 1D physics before introducing the complications of vectors), but he's such an expert in this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave his book off of the list. (It's organized in a bit of a weird way, mind you.)
I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought to list. Debora Katz has a new book that I just heard about that emphasizes case studies, for example. But yeah: almost any of these books are fundamentally different than the classics in some way, and worlds better in my opinion.
- A few thoughts, speaking as a physics professor who asks his relativity students to play both "Velocity Raptor" and "A Slower Speed of Light":
* Like many others here, I was a bit dismayed to see this implemented as a Java applet. Increasing security concerns have meant that I've been able to use fewer and fewer of those in my classes: it's just not reasonable to ask students to jump through those hoops anymore.
* When I look at the menu, it only goes up through level 7.
* I have made very little progress on level 8 (the one with the diffraction grating in the middle that's trying to get you to reach 2% transmission at about an 80 degree angle on each side). I have a general idea of what you want me to do, but I get so little visible transmission most of the time that it feels all but impossible to fine-tune my momentum or other aspects of my strategy. (Is there any way to increase the slit widths or number of slits or something to make that easier?)
* What exactly do the arrow keys do? Are you imposing a linear potential gradient across the whole screen for a short time? It's hard to judge "accuracy" when I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at. (That also means I'm not entirely sure how to teach it.)
* Along similar lines, do you have a sense of what exactly is leading to the visible interference effects during motion? (The ones that you point out can be guides as to which direction the wave is moving?) Maybe I ought to have a direct intuition for this! Is it purely an effect of reflections off of the walls, or would I see the same thing if I started with a Gaussian wave packet in a linear potential without any boundaries at all? (And if it's reflection related, why is it mostly showing the direction of primary motion rather than the direction of the reflections?) Some explanation for this might be nice in a teaching tool.
* Do you think you could allow the user to toggle the phase-rainbow mode on and off? (That's the mode that I would expect to always give an indication of the dominant momentum of the wave function.)
* The "collapse" mechanic is very helpful for game play, but might deserve some sort of explanation. In particular, I worry that it could train students to believe a critical misconception: that if the probability of a particular state becomes high enough, that state immediately becomes "true". Maybe that wouldn't turn out to be a serious concern, but I'm not certain that beginners are well-equipped to recognize which weird aspects of game play are supposed to reflect real physics and which are mere game enhancements. (The way collapse works here feels a lot like Copenhagen, but not quite, since it doesn't obey the Born probability rule.)
* It would allow for significantly richer strategy and game play if the player had a wider menu of potential functions to choose from. (For instance, what if the arrow keys continued to be linear potential functions and a mouse click provided a harmonic oscillator?)
* In your explanatory text, I'm not comfortable with your discussion of decoherence. I'm far from an expert on that subject, so I'm hesitant to try to offer specific corrections. But it feels off to me. (In particular, a single quantum particle bouncing off of strict potential energy walls should not be a manifestation of decoherence, because the particle's state isn't becoming entangled with the state of those walls in any way. I don't see any manifestation of decoherence in the game.)
In case you're interested, my current favorite intro level textbook on quantum mechanics is Tom Moore's "Six Ideas that Shaped Physics: Unit Q". It doesn't go as far as I'd like for a really thorough course (which is especially true in the recent 3rd edition, though the material that's still there is presented much more clearly), but as part of an introductory sequence it does a great job. Much like Townsend's fantastic Jr/Sr level text, Moore first introduces the "rules" of quantum mechanics in the context of two-state spin systems (in a slightly simplified version of Dirac's bra-ket notation), and only moves to wave functions once the fundamental concepts are established. (It doesn't manage to do a whole lot with time dependent position/momentum systems like the ones you're simulating, though.)
- This explanation is correct, but I find it pretty empty of intuition: "Here's a magic formula! Look, it adds up funny." I've taught relativity quite a bit recently, and I much prefer to build intuition using "space-time diagrams" (or "Minkowski diagrams") showing coordinate systems for two different observers.
Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics textbook (Unit R) does a very nice job of this. But here's a really bargain-basement handout that I made many years ago to explain the idea before I started using Moore's text for this. (I'd probably do it a little differently now.) http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/classes/spacetime.pdf
My discussion of velocity addition there (at the bottom of page three out of four in that PDF) is much too terse for this context, I'm afraid. But if you draw my example there carefully and measure in the tilted coordinates as described earlier, you'll start to see why the leftmost observer still measures the rightmost observer moving less than the speed of light.
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