Matter and motion

What Hacker News says

1. abecedariusApr 2015
   It is as if in some post-apocalyptic future, scholars would learn about the work of Newton and Einstein from surviving articles in Scientific American or New Scientist.

   Yes. Lucio Russo in The Forgotten Revolution made the same point and tried to figure out what got lost in that game of telephone. (A lot!)

   Here's a book not exactly for the general reader but that I think is underappreciated: James Clerk Maxwell's Matter and Motion. https://archive.org/details/mattermotion00maxwiala It's a textbook on mechanics assuming a high-school math background.

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2. projectileboyApr 2015
   Thank your for the link to Matter and Motion. I had never heard of it, and I'm enjoying what I've read thus far. It reminds me in a way of the Feynman Lectures. The greats often seem to have a way of explaining concepts in the most clear, concise way possible.
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3. abecedariusJan 2017
   Yes, if you supplement it with problems -- you'll have to find them elsewhere or make some up yourself. (There's a companion book of exercises recently published, not on the website, which I haven't read.)

   Of course different books help most for different people. This one's not the best if you want to pass a course and put it behind you. I think it's very much worth checking out if you want to be challenged and inspired to tackle problems for yourself and perhaps pick up a bit of how Feynman thought. There are very few other introductory texts by physicists of his stature: Matter and Motion by Maxwell, and, well, anything else? (Not counting popularizations; it's a fuzzy distinction, but these are securely on the textbook side.)

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