Thinking Physics
Lewis Carroll Epstein explains deep ideas in physics in an easy-to-understand way. Thinking Physics is a perfect beginner's guide to an amazingly wide range of physics-related questions. The book targets topics that science teachers and students spend time wondering about, like wing lift. Epstein elucidates the familiar but misunderstood — such as how tides work — along with more obscure but fascinating phenomena like the "Bernoulli sub" and the "artificial aurora" created by hydrogen bombs. Broken into many short sections and peppered with Epstein's own playful hand-drawn illustrations, the book does not simply give the right answer: It also goes into the answers that seem right but are wrong and shows why they are wrong — a rarity in science books. Thinking Physics is a rigorously correct, lighthearted, and cleverly designed Q and A book for physicists of all ages.
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- "Thinking Physics" by Lewis Carroll Epstein, read after I received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. I suddenly realized that I hadn't learned anything in my degree and was functionally useless. Since then I have built a solid base of understanding of algebra, trigonometry, statistics, and intermediate database theory, although I unfortunately remain mostly ignorant about aerospace engineering.
- You could try "Thinking Physics," available from Amazon (or LibGen)
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Pract...
- If you don't already have it, "Thinking Physics" by Lewis Carroll Epstein is very good.
Also: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18360071
- It's not easy and you'd need to find problems to work, but http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu is one source some people swear by. Others say it's too hard for a beginner text. I think both have a point, but it's free to see for yourself.
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Pract... is not free, but also excellent and gentler.
- Many older and classic texts, recently I've read a bit of The Art of Electronics and Thinking Physics from there. Just using the search feature. Lots of unrelated content though.
- Thinking Physics: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Pract...
It's a little bit like The Little Schemer in that it often asks you a question and expects you to try to answer it before turning the page (or turning it upside down). The problems tend to go like "if you did this, would that (A) increase (B) decrease (C) stay the same" or "(A) increase by one (B) double (C) quadruple" -- to minimize technical machinery while still engaging you with genuine problems, not vague analogies.
The same author has a book on relativity which looked very good from the first couple of chapters I read.
