[drostie]

I help out on Physics Stack Exchange and the Freenode ##physics channel can still be nicely active sometimes, though not as active as ##math is.

If you want that sort of story, one textbook that you might incredibly like would be Griffiths' Introduction to Elementary Particles, which has a very readable first section going into the history of how we came to have the Standard Model that we have today, some names of who discovered what, etc.

A. Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell is also very nice for getting a sort of pleasant appreciation for quantum field theory if you've got some mathematical background.

It also depends on what you take for granted as a baseline. If you can find Feynman's New Zealand lectures, for example, you will notice that he deliberately avoids introducing explicit complex numbers or explicit integration, and still manages to convey what both of those mathematical formalisms allow the theory to do. (There are also some little gems. Like, if you pay attention to the part where he says something like "I wish I had brought an example of one of these surfaces where we've erased lines of the mirror so that I could show you" -- then you're in the right position to say, "holy crap, I understand the rainbows that I see in the bottom of CDs/DVDs now!" after a second.)

Sussman of Lisp fame went on to write The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/... .

I'd be remiss if I did not mention that the father of String Theory is on a quest to provide everyone with the education needed to appreciate the current theories of physics; see http://theoreticalminimum.com/ or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA .

If you really want cutting-edge sometimes-somewhat-unbelievable stuff, the Perimeter Institute publishes their lectures-for-the-public online; you might for example really like Penrose's idea that maybe someday when all the black holes have evaporated, all of the particles become massless and they no longer experience time so we can just evolve the system to t=infinity after some finite time: so we discover that what we get as our boundary at infinity could be conformally rescaled to something resembling a t=0 Big Bang -- a "conformal cyclic cosmology". See http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose for more of that sort of stuff.

[agumonkey]

Hi drostie, you read SICM ? I'm still wondering how good it is, it felt mind blowing for a CS guy, but it's so rarely mentioned that I thought it was more like an exercise by the author.

Also, out of curiosity do you know non English books of rare quality ?

[drostie]

Hey, sorry this took me a while to respond to -- I have a script which polls HN to custom-order the posts I see, so I am not often on the main site.

SICM is basically a mainline classical mechanics textbook of the form that I was able to do my Bachelor's in, but combined with some tantalizing snippets of Lisp code which make it seem like there's something deeply interesting there, too. There's a magical feeling where you're like "holy crap if I could nail down the mathematical notation a little more and get some of these routines as efficient library built-ins, this would be like a programming sandbox that could teach a student physics by direct interaction."