Solid state physics

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1. PaulHouleApr 2025
   I think "life changing" and "universal" are contradictory.

   A person who is ready to pick up the bar, for instance, would benefit from Rippetoe's Starting Strength but if you don't pick up the bar it's just another book (you might get something from just plain lifting Schwarzenegger's Modern Weighlifting though, if not the Misner, Thorne and Wheeler book Gravitation.) Similarly Super System will change your life if you are serious about playing poker, otherwise it's just a fun read like the D&D Monster Manual I'd say that Ashcroft and Mermin's Solid State Physics was a great adventure even if I didn't end up doing physics in the end, but I was a grad student in condensed matter and I took Ashcroft's class. When I was wanting to explore the edges of applied philosophy and literature I felt Alain Badiou's Being and Event was meaningful to me but a lot of people would say it is obscurantist French trash like Derrida and if you believe that I can't change your mind.

   I'd tend to reject categorically that fiction could be life changing but maybe that's harsh. So often people nominate books that to me are trash like Atlas Shrugged, The Illuminati Trilogy or Hitchhiker's Guide. From time to time though I do discover an author with a large body of work that I'm obsessed with for a few months, like last year I rediscovered Poul Anderson (want to see Dominic Flandry have a fight with Kimball Kinnison) and got into Pratchett's Discworld.

   I think a lot of books that offer simple answers to things like books by Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Greene are often harmful and also I think Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl is absolute poison for 21st century people.

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2. PaulHouleMar 2025
   Depends on the book. There are a lot of books that are the equivalent of a podcast episode (anything by Malcolm Gladwell) or a series of podcast episodes (anything by Robert Greene) and even some serious and influential books in the social sciences and can be cooked down to a single university lecture like

   Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

   Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson

   The Zero-sum Society by Lester Thurow (want to know why the world gave up on tariffs?)

   maybe some worthwhile management books could be extended into a podcast series, I'd say

   Quality is Free by Phillip Crosby

   Then there are some books that really could change your life, say

   Solid State Physics by Ashcroft and Mermin

   The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth

   Principles of Compiler Design by Aho and Ullman

   Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell

   The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home by Paul Stamets

   Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

   Being and Event by Alain Badiou

   Liberation in the Palm of your Hand by Pabongka Rinpoche

   The Art of Happiness by Mirko Fryba

   All of which have the element that they'll only change you if you engage deeply with them or the subject, like for the Rippetoe book you're going to have to pick up a bar.

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3. kurtosisApr 2009
   So this is why Mermin and Ashcroft's Solid State Physics has been one of the standard graduate texts for the field since it was published in '76.

   According to Wikipedia Lev Landau ranked physicists on a log scale - Newton was 0, Einstein 1 and Mermin placed himself on the scale at a 4.5

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4. jissqrt-1Feb 2024
   to my knowledge there are many such examples

   i think that chemistry and the biological sciences can get pretty "empirical" at times. like chemical reactions/processes which are done in a specific way simply because experience shows that that's the best way to do it. or pharmaceuticals whose efficacy is supported mostly by experience, and we have just vague ideas for mechanisms of action.

   sure these cases are usually not 100% empirical, there is some theory... but contrast it with, say mechanisms in machines or electronic circuits where you can usually correctly predict the effect on the behavior of the variation of whatever parameter you want.

   i wish i could come up with a lot of examples but i don't think they're hard to find. i'll just say the following: just saw a thread on HN about how exposure to certain pesticides may cause Parkinson's disease. there is some theory behind it (the molecule (paraquat) is similar to another known one (MPTP) which causes Parkinson's disease immediately upon ingestion), but that's it, the rest of the evidence is like empirical correlations between proximity to agricultural regions and higher prevalence of Parkinson's disease.

   if you think that's not empirical enough, again, compare it with whatever electronic circuit where you can precisely predict the effect of changing most of the parameters of the circuit.

   just my uneducated opinion...

   EDIT: just remembered one thing. relevant passage from Ashcroft & Mermin "Solid-State Physics":

   > Justifying the semiclassical model in detail is a formidable task, considerably more difficult than justifying the ordinary classical limit for free electrons. In this book we shall not offer a systematic derivation. Our emphasis instead will be on how the semiclassical model is used. We shall therefore simply describe the model, state the limitations on its validity, and extract some of its major physical consequences.

   > The reader who is dissatisfied with the very incomplete and merely suggestive bases we shall offer for the semiclassical model is urged to examine the broad array of mysteries and anomalies of free electron theory that the model resolves. Perhaps a suitable attitude to take is this: If there were no underlying microscopic quantum theory of electrons in solids, one could still imagine a semiclassical mechanics (guessed by some late nineteenth-century Newton of crystalline spaces) that was brilliantly confirmed by its account of observed electronic behavior, just as classical mechanics was confirmed by its accounting for planetary motion, and only very much later given a more fundamental derivation as a limiting form of quantum mechanics.

   so the theory of electrical conduction in metals or semiconductors, i'm not sure it has been fully justified from more fundamental physics, or to what extent it's "empirical". the same probably goes for chemical reactions, which in principle could be entirely explained on the basis of QM, but probably aren't.

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5. a9h74jApr 2022
   Fun fact: When I was in a highly respected grad school in the 1980s (multiple Nobel Prize winners in the department), the QFT course was presented in such an obscure way, I stopped attending lectures, and I doubt anyone passed. The next year under "QFT" they taught Ashcroft -- i.e. a Solid State Physics course. That way requirements were met.
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6. BostonianSep 2021
   Physics -- paper and pencil, in the late 1980s, at Harvard. Books such as Purcell, "Electricity and Magnetism", Reif, "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics", Liboff, "Introductory Quantum Mechanics", Sakurai, "Modern Quantum Mechanics", Ashcroft and Mermin, "Solid State Physics", Brown and Churchill, "Complex Variables and Applications", and "Fourier Series and Boundary Value Problems".
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