The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics Pdf
The Theoretical Minimum
What Yous Demand To Know To Beginning Thinking Like a Physicist
This folio is designed to back up the volume, "The Theoretical Minimum" by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky. This book will exist released past Bones Books in Due north America, and Penguin Press in the Great britain on 29 January 2013.
This site will contain material to support those interested in the book. This volition include hints and detailed solutions to the practise bug and boosted materials that did not fit, or could not be used in the book.
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A earth-grade physicist and a citizen scientist combine forces to teach Physics 101�the DIY style.
The Theoretical Minimum is a book for anyone who has ever regretted not taking physics in higher�or who just wants to know how to think like a physicist. In this unconventional introduction, physicist Leonard Susskind and citizen-scientist George Hrabovsky offer a first grade in physics and associated math for the agog apprentice. Unlike well-nigh popular physics books�which give readers a taste of what physicists know but shy away from equations or math�Susskind and Hrabovsky actually teach the skills you need to do physics, commencement with classical mechanics, yourself. Based on Susskind�s enormously popular Stanford Academy-based (and YouTube-featured) continuing-didactics grade, the authors cover the minimum�the theoretical minimum of the title�that readers demand to principal to study more advanced topics.
Somewhere in Steinbeck land 2 tired men sit down down at the side of the road. Lenny combs his beard with his fingers and says, �Tell me about the laws of physics, George.� George looks down for a moment, then peers at Lenny over the tops of his glasses. �Okay, Lenny, but but the minimum.�
An alternative to the conventional go-to-college method, The Theoretical Minimum provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.
Annotation: This book was written and typeset in Mathematica versions seven, 8, and nine.
Leonard Susskind has been the Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics at Stanford Academy since 1978. The author of The Black Hole War and The Cosmic Landscape , he lives in Palo Alto, California.
George Hrabovsky is the president of Madison Expanse Science and Technology (MAST), a nonprofit organisation defended to scientific and technological research and education. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Advance PRAISE FOR The Theoretical Minimum
�What a wonderful and unique resource. For anyone who is adamant to learn physics for real, looking beyond conventional popularizations, this is the ideal identify to get-go. It gets direct to the important points, with nuggets of deep insight scattered along the way. I'm going to be recommending this book right and left.�
�Sean Carroll, physicist, California Institute of Engineering, and author of The Particle at the Cease of the Universe
"Readers set to embrace their inner applied mathematician volition enjoy this brisk, bare-basic introduction to classical mechanics drawn from Stanford University�s �Continuing Studies� programme. Although physicist Susskind (The Black Hole War) and science advocate Hrabovsky touch briefly on electricity and magnetism, the book is primarily about mechanics and the motion of particles. The authors open with a look at closed and open systems and the reversibility of physical laws, a concept cardinal to the field. Next are rigorous chapters on trigonometry and vectors, and a no-nonsense intro to differential and integral calculus, and how these tools are used to calculate the motion of objects through space. Not for the faint of heart, successive capacity introduce Newton�s law of movement, the complex mathematics of �systems� of particles, phase space, conservation of momentum, and the Principle of Least Action, which allows scientists to �parcel� a system�due south velocity, mass, direction, and forces into a unmarried function. The authors intend this volume every bit a toolkit for determined readers who desire to teach themselves basic mechanics. Although their discussions are clear plenty, fifty-fifty the hardiest reader volition want to bring a bones calculus text along for the journeying. 62 line drawings."
�Publishers Weekly
Click hither to visit the MAST web site.
Excerpts:
From the Preface
I�ve always enjoyed explaining physics. For me it�s much more than educational activity: It�south a style of thinking. Even when I�m at my desk doing research, there�southward a dialog going on in my caput. Figuring out the all-time manner to explicate something is almost e'er the best style to understand it yourself. Almost ten years agone someone asked me if I would teach a class for the public. As information technology happens, the Stanford area has a lot of people who in one case wanted to study physics, just life got in the way. They had had all kinds of careers only never forgot their 1-time infatuation with the laws of the universe. Now, subsequently a career or two, they wanted to get back into it, at least at a casual level. Unfortunately there was non much opportunity for such folks to take courses. Equally a rule, Stanford and other universities don�t allow outsiders into classes, and, for most of these grown-ups, going back to school as a full-time student is non a realistic option. That bothered me. In that location ought to be a way for people to develop their interest past interacting with active scientists, but there didn�t seem to be one. That�s when I first found out about Stanford�southward Continuing Studies program. This program offers courses for people in the local nonacademic customs. So I thought that it might just serve my purposes in finding someone to explain physics to, as well equally their purposes, and it might also exist fun to teach a form on modern physics. For one academic quarter anyway. It was fun. And it was very satisfying in a way that teaching undergraduate and graduate students was sometimes non. These students were in that location for but one reason: Not to get credit, non to become a caste, and not to be tested, merely just to larn and indulge their curiosity. Also, having been �around the block� a few times, they were not at all agape to enquire questions, so the class had a lively vibrancy that academic classes often lack. I decided to do it again. And again. What became articulate after a couple of quarters is that the students were not completely satisfied with the layperson�south courses I was teaching. They wanted more than the Scientific American experience. A lot of them had a bit of background, a bit of physics, a rusty but not dead cognition of calculus, and some experience at solving technical issues. They were ready to effort their manus at learning the real thing�with equations. The result was a sequence of courses intended to bring these students to the forefront of modernistic physics and cosmology. Fortunately, someone (not I) had the bright idea to video-record the classes. They are out on the Internet, and it seems that they are tremendously popular: Stanford is not the only place with people hungry to learn physics. From all over the world I go thousands of electronic mail letters. Ane of the main inquiries is whether I volition ever convert the lectures into books? The Theoretical Minimum is the reply. The term theoretical minimum was non my own invention. Information technology originated with the corking Russian physicist Lev Landau. The TM in Russia meant everything a educatee needed to know to piece of work under Landau himself. Landau was a very enervating human: His theoretical minimum meant but about everything he knew, which of course no one else could possibly know. I use the term differently. For me, the theoretical minimum means just what you demand to know in order to keep to the side by side level. It ways not fat encyclopedic textbooks that explicate everything, but thin books that explain everything important. The books closely follow the Internet courses that you will detect on the Web. Welcome, then, to The Theoretical Minimum�Classical Mechanics, and skillful luck! Leonard Susskind I started to teach myself math and physics when I was eleven. That was twoscore years ago. A lot of things have happened since then�I am one of those individuals who got sidetracked by life. Still, I have learned a lot of math and physics. Despite the fact that people pay me to do research for them, I never pursued a degree. For me, this book began with an e-postal service. After watching the lectures that class the basis for the book, I wrote an e-mail to Leonard Susskind asking if he wanted to turn the lectures into a volume. One thing led to some other, and here we are. Nosotros could not fit everything we wanted into this book, or it wouldn�t exist The Theoretical Minimum�Classical Mechanics, it would be A-Big-Fat-Mechanics-Book. That is what the Internet is for: Taking up large quantities of bandwidth to brandish stuff that doesn�t fit elsewhere! You tin can detect extra material at the website world wide web.madscitech.org/tm. This material will include answers to the bug, demonstrations, and additional cloth that nosotros couldn�t put in the volume. I promise you enjoy reading this book as much every bit nosotros enjoyed writing it. George Hrabovsky
Stanford, California, July 2012
Madison, Wisconsin, July 2012
Office of Chapter i.
Agenda of Events
Sunday, 10 March 2013: George Hrabovsky will discuss The Theoretical Minimum in specific and apprentice science in full general at the Madison Science Pub, 2pm at Brocach Irish Pub on Primary Street off the Capitol Square in Madison, WI.
Thursday, 21 March 2013: George Hrabovsky will discuss The Theoretical Minimum at the Madison Science Cafe, 5 PM at the Steep and Mash on Land Street in Madison WI.
Thursday, 18 April 2013: George Hrabovsky will give a workshop based on the The Theoretical Minimum at Barnes and Noble Bookstore at Eastward Towne Mall, in Madison, WI, at 5 PM.
Boosted Material
These files crave either Mathematica 8 or later, or the complimentary Mathematica CDF Viewer, though the viewer cannot run the programs, (you tin notice that here). There volition be pdf options in nigh cases.
Solutions to Exercises 
Errata (pdf)
As of Apr 2014 in that location is a new edition containing all of the errata in the previous document. There is a new errata:
Errata (pdf)
Logic and Proof: A short introduction to the principles of logic and how to construct proofs. (pdf)
Additional Titles by The Authors
Leonard Susskind
The Blackness Hole State of war
The Catholic Mural
An Introduction to Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution
George Hrabovsky
Self-Instruction and Teaching: Science Education for the New Millennium, paperback , hardcover.
For those who are experiencing difficulty with the mathematics, please consult the new grade being offered through the MAST website on Simple Mathematical Methods for Science.
Source: https://www.madscitech.org/tm/
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