[bmitc]

I checked out Newton’s Principia in graduate school. It’s incomprehensible because it heavily uses geometric arguments that basically no one uses these days. It’s hard stuff and looks nothing like modern calculus. I think it was L’Hospital’s book that actually looks very similar to modern-day calculus.

Leibniz’ work, from what little I’ve seen is a bit more readable, mainly because he was concerned with the conceptual-ness of it all.

Feynman, for a challenge, decided to do things the old-school geometric way, and he reported it was “damn hard”.

[exmadscientist]

In contrast, Einstein on (special) relativity is excellent. I haven't revisited them since my undergrad days, but I remember being surprised by just how clear and direct the original papers were. Much easier to understand than many modern attempts! The terminology is a bit outdated in places (such as, if I'm remembering right, what you call the mass term γ m₀), but that's not hard to deal with.

[bmitc]

Yea, Einstein’s papers and a lot of those early 20th century physics papers are surprisingly quite readable, even for a moderate layman such as myself. Because of this, I must say I find Carroll’s claim that he’s never read one of Einstein’s relativity papers a bit dubious.

Dirac’s paper on magnetic monopoles contains a rather beautiful and general introduction on progress in physics. I highly recommend it.

http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/files/dirac1931.p...

[agnosticmantis]

This makes me wonder how important or useful rigorous / axiomatic arguments for intuitively true “facts” are. As far as applications are concerned, it seems like the physicist’s math (what Feynman calls Babylonian math as opposed to the axiomatic Greek math) works well enough, while rigorization often trails by decades or centuries (as in the case of calculus).