[sampo]

> How long would I have to study physics to be able to understand everything in this sentence?

Just start reading David J. Griffiths: Introduction to Electrodynamics. A very well written textbook. The problem might be, if you don't know vector calculus, you might not be able to read this book, so you need to learn some vector calculus, too.

Then start reading Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths, too. Best introductory QM book that I know of. If you managed to read Electrodynamics, you should by now know enough calculus for this book, too. But you also need to know about complex numbers here.

The "inviscid compressible fluid" is about fluid mechanics. I don't know any splendid textbook on that.

[tallon]

I disagree with the suggestion of Griffith's QM. Somehow, Griffiths made an excellent EM book, but terrible QM. I find Shankar's Principles of Quantum Mechanics to be much more comprehensive and easy to follow.

[projectileboy]

Wow, so nice to hear props for Griffiths' textbooks. I think he's by far the best physics textbook author.

[kjak]

I think Griffiths' E&M book is great. It's very enjoyable and makes a fine book to use before going on to Jackson (although more supplements are often needed to make it through that). I like Griffiths' writing and I liked the problems and examples he gives in this book.

However, I never liked Griffiths' QM book. The writing is OK (it's mostly in the same style as the E&M book, but to me it just seems like he tries too hard). Overall I didn't like his selection of which topics went to examples and which went to problems. I think Cohen-Tannoudji, et al., is the way to go for learning some QM. It's a bit more formal than Griffiths, but I think it makes far more sense and it has tons of good examples in the appendices.

But, to each his own.

[nilkn]

I haven't read it, and it may be too advanced for this purpose, but Landau's books are generally held in extremely high regard and volume six of his Course of Theoretical Physics is on fluid mechanics.

For what it's worth, volumes two and three cover electrodynamics and quantum mechanics, respectively.

[sampo]

> Landau's books

Landau's presentation is extremely condensed. Griffiths is much more friendly towards the reader.

I would compare Landau to Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. Some people do read them, but the rest of us just hold them in extremely high regard :-).

[jeffwass]

The Landau Lifshitz series is absolutely amazing. It works so well with my brain, entirely concise with just enough textual clarification as needed.

Eg, volume 1 is classical mechanics. By page 3 or so you e already derived the Lagrangian equations of motion.

[jarvist]

Landau/Lifshitz are freely available on the Internet archive:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22L.D.+Landa...

[mbq]

For superfluid mechanics (which they seem to be using as a foundation) Donnelly's "Quantized Vortices in Helium II"'s introduction is a pretty good start. The field is quite hermetic, though.