| Note: The draft linked in the title [1] has been superseded by the finished book [2] (free pdf download here [3]), which is even better! This is probably the most useful book I have read during my studies in physics and I highly recommend it to everybody with some technical interest because it focuses on teaching general and useful tools (using science and engineering examples (mainly physics)). During the first years of my studies I did reasonably well, but it always felt like I was just manipulating symbols on paper, and the results didn't mean much to me -- it was all just theory (and if the results would have come out some other way I probably would have believed that too). This book taught me how to be reckless and throw away unnecessary complexity in order to make said theory simple enough to apply it easily to real-world problems, which suddenly made my theory knowledge much, much more useful (previously it was mainly good for passing exams). Now, during my PhD I still use the methods from the book almost daily! Compared to the earlier book draft [1] that has been floating on the web for many years, the final book is much improved, mainly because it focuses on general tools rather than specific physics topics. However, if you want to have a quick demonstration of how powerful the methods from the book are, I'd recommend to read chapter 9.3 about waves in [1], which unfortunately only partially made it into the final book. Within a few pages you quickly derive all the properties of waves in different regimes and draw practical conclusions such as the speed limit for boats, the speed of tsunamis, why bugs walking on water don't generate waves, etc! [1] http://web.mit.edu/6.055/book/book-draft.pdf [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-insight-science-and-engin... [3] https://www.dropbox.com/s/bmqwzc8qqt5lv9p/9017.pdf?dl=1 |
[0] http://streetfightingmath.com
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14343058
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11523197
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1548013