The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics

I majored in humanities but I'm interested in math and science, and I find this book both challenging and rewarding. But as I worked through it I found a number of things that looked wrong. Eventually I Googled the book's web site and found an Errata file that I downloaded. It identified 58 errors, most of them in equations and many of them significant enough to thoroughly befuddle a careful reader who trusted the book as written. That's an appalling number of errors. Somebody at Basic Books ought to be looking for a new job. I recommend the book if you are interested and willing to read carefully, but if you can't wait for a second, corrected printing be sure to download the Errata before you dig in!

This 220 page 6 x 8.5 little text is packed with valuable nuggets, and does NOT shy away from advanced math. This book is based on the popular Stanford, online and YouTube "adult ed" lectures and is targeted at scientists and "amateurs" who missed physics in undergrad but are still interested.

NOT a "popular" physics book with a bunch of fluffy, non substantial speculation about membranes, stings, fractals, superpositioned states and multiple universes! Has real, tough, solid content with a LOT of advanced formulas, including tensors and many partial derivatives. You CAN "get" these with supplemental study, but the pace of the 11 lectures included is fast enough to leave you behind very quickly if you're rusty in math.

I teach ordinary differential equations to non engineers at classpros dot com, including Psychologists interested in the latest progress in nonlinear dynamical systems as applied to neurons, behavior, etc. This book is a real GEM as an intro to those topics, without "dumbing down" the content for a "lay" audience.

If you love reading populist texts on quantum physics, etc. this wonderful book will take you all the way from classic upwards, with the requisite math, and will provide a great foundation for really getting what's going on in the more advanced areas. Unfortunately, the math will scare lots of folks off, but please, don't be one of them!

The 11 lectures included are: 1. Classical Physics, 2. Motion, 3. Dynamics, 4. Multiple Particle Systems, 5. Energy, 6. Least Action Principle, 7. Symmetries and Conservation, 8. Hamiltonian Mechanics, 9. Phase Space Fluid and Gibbs-Liouville, 10. Poisson Brackets, Angular Momentum, Symmetries, 11. Electric and Magnetic Forces.

There also is an appendix on Central Forces and Planetary Orbits and "math interludes" on Trig, Vectors, Integrals and PDE's. NOTE that only classical mechanics are covered here, HOWEVER circular motion and momentum are covered, and if you've seen the "Feynman" approach to QED ([[ASIN:0691024170 QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter]]), you know that even advanced Physics grad students were astonished that Richard was able to use "clock metaphors" and circular momentum to explain Quantum math and mechanics that normally take a grad student 3 years to master!

Nothing is covered in a LOT of depth, for example there's little on computational complexity, but the theory of information conservation is touched on briefly as the "most fundamental of all physical laws" -- the cyclic "memory" of where we start and end!

The REALLY COOL thing is that the authors don't talk down to us, they assume that just as "amateurs" can discover new stars in Astronomy, non-college types can also make great new contributions in Physics! No fooling, no tongue in cheek. Seems like a revolutionary view from Stanford types, but perhaps they've seen the future of distributed, non-brick and mortar education for real! At under 20 bucks this is a MUST HAVE even for HS students in my humble opinion. GREAT GIFT for a bright grandchild for their 18th birthday as well! This is such an original math refresher too, that I'm guessing a lot of folks will also use it to brush up on applied math. By page 60 we're already at differential equations-- so hang on to your saddle!

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I can't really express how disappointed I was in this book. My academic training is in formal languages, and I have been both an instructor of ethics at the university level, and a radio frequency technician. Currently I work for the government and use my free time to work on computers and other technologies that dovetail with radio frequency in both theory and practice. The only reason I mention any of that is as a preface to help highlight the point that I am not simply an uninformed reader with an ax to grind against intellectually difficult books. I enjoy difficult books, as a general rule, but this book wasn't difficult, it was impossible. I'll highlight the two main problems I have with this book as clearly as I can:

1) Lack of demonstration---The authors (even with the supplemental "answers" section from their website) don't do an effective job of showing their work. When dealing with such a condensed presentation of calculus aimed at individuals who "regretted not taking physics in college", it would have been beneficial if even a few of the problems were written in a clear, annotated, step -by-step manner. They are not. As I mentioned, being an individual whose academic background is in formal languages, the method which the authors use to present their solutions to equations is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard for me. How is a beginner supposed to grasp proof methods or how to properly use an equation that has been introduced if there is so much jumping around and "you fill in the blank" points in the text? Some notation, which I'm sure would be new to any beginner, is given all of one sentence to explain its proper use...and then the reader is left to kind of figure out the rest. This kind of an approach makes the book useless for a beginner. All one ends up doing is looking to other books in order to find out how to use this book. In fact, the presentation of derivatives was so convoluted that I had to reference an old calculus book of mine just to make sense of what the authors were trying to say.

2) Lack of practical application. Now, I know what people who love this book will say, "This is a book on theory, not practice." Fine. I can accept that, but surely it couldn't have hurt to try and pop in a few concrete examples. Perhaps it is my background in RF tech that biases me, but the chapter on electric and magnetic forces is so exclusively an exercise in formula shuffling that, after reading it, a student new to some of the concepts couldn't possibly form the first coherent idea about how technology actually utilizing electrical and magnetic forces might work. This seems like a lack to me, even for a book about theory.

So, those are my two cents. Take them or leave them, but I can't, in all good conscience, recommend this book to anyone.

I'm not going to comment on the content, others have done that.

What I will warn the potential buyer is that the mathematical typography is so ugly that it goes beyond simple aesthetic pain to making the math actually difficult to read. The book appears to have been typeset by someone with zero knowledge of math standards, and no interest in learning. The math fonts are an incoherent jumble --- the typesetter started with an ugly and mathematically inappropriate font, then added random symbols from other fonts as necessary. The sizes of symbols frequently don't match up. Sub- and superscripts are printed at the same size as mainline symbols. Spacing is incoherent and random.
It's really, REALLY bad --- absolutely unacceptable in an age where TeX is commonplace.

You may think I exaggerate but, if you have any experience reading mathematics, you'll soon enough see what I mean if you start to read this book. (You won't see it if you do a "Look inside the book", which only shows you the first chapter. The true horror stories start when we we hit calculus.)

I'm only halfway through this book, but I felt I had to write a review. In many ways this is the book I was looking for... a genuine attempt to communicate concepts that unify Physics, not a diatribe on how brilliant the author is and how amazing the reader is for understanding all the complicated math formulas. Even with a non-existent or elementary knowledge of Calculus, if you want to get a deep understanding of dynamics, energy and conservation laws (if you don't know what these are, read the book!), this is the book for you. I feel I finally 'get' Physics.

Professor Susskind is a researcher in cutting-edge Physics, and he is smart enough to know that the basic concepts that underlie Classical and Quantum Mechanics can be grasped by anyone.

I am an electrical engineer who was looking for a refresher in the Physics that I took in college and was attracted to the description of this book. I found this book to be extremely disappointing. The authors seem more enamored with Calculus than Physics as the book substitutes well known commonly expressions for laws of physics with needless Calculus. (simplest example: saying F = mass times 2nd derivative of x instead of the well known F = ma). This continues through entire book. Whereas I started reading the book with much anticipative enthusiasm, I was forced to stop in disgust midway through the book.

I suggest the authors change the title from any mention of Physics to be Calculus instead.

Up front, I want to acknowledge that throughout school and college, my lowest grades were in mathematics and natural science courses and I passed the last one I took only because I promised the instructor I would never take another. However, I had heard raves from non-scientists about Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky's book and now I understand why so many others think so highly of it.

First, for non-scientists such as I, this is what the book is NOT: easy to read and understand, dumbed down/watered down/etc., condescending, riveting or boring. Susskind and Hrabovsky introduce and correlate material in incremental, almost layered fashion so that (like LEGOS), items of information are carefully connected and combined to increase the reader's understanding. I found the pace of this progression from Lecture 1 until Lecture 11 somewhat brisk at times but somehow I managed to keep up and, of course, could always re-read one of the three "Interludes" or an earlier passage in a Lecture that I highlighted in anticipation of confusion later.

Susskind and Hrabovsky include several dozen "Exercises" within the narrative. I strongly recommend having a notebook near at hand in which to complete them. (Note: The Mead Black Marble Wide-Ruled Composition Book is my personal preference.) I also strongly recommend adding Appendix 2 in which the authors explain how best to formulate correct responses to the exercises...also [begin italics] why [end italics]. Readers will appreciate the direct and personal, conversational rapport that Susskind and Hrabovsky establish and then sustain. Reading the book was not an easy "journey" for me to complete and therefore I appreciated having these knowledgeable and patient mentors as my companions.

Consider this passage in Interlude 2, Page 55:

"There are some tricks to doing integrals. One trick is to look them up in a table of integrals. Another is to learn to use Mathematica. But if you're on your own and you don't recognize the integral, the oldest trick in the book is integration by parts."

The words are in English but might just as well have been in Mandarin or Welsh. Only after re-reading several passages did I finally "get it." More than a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted that he would "give his life for simplicity on the other side of complexity." Time and again as worked my way through this book, I remembered that statement and now believe that the theoretical minimum is to be found there.

I cannot claim that I fully understand, much less appreciate all of the material that Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky provide but I do think the book has increased substantially my understanding of how to start doing physics. My next step is to re-read the passages I have highlighted and, in a month or two, take another shot at the exercises.

How rare that, when establishing a tutorial relationship with readers such as I, they do not make the material easier; rather, they make it [begin italics] easier to understand [end of italics] by improving our skills so that we understand it better than we otherwise could. I am again reminded that all great teachers are great explainers.

The material in "The Theoretical Minimum" is a lot to swallow; lots of equations and lots of "I'll leave the rest to you". It is more like class notes without the answers. I have a degree in Physics from 50 years ago and I struggled.

A better and more interesting book is Isaac Asimov's "Understanding Physics" which is 3 volumes in one: (1) Motion, sound and heat; (2) Light, magnetism and electricity; (3) the electron, proton and neutron.

but, the math is not, at least for me; this is definitely not a book for a total beginner. Lots of differential, partial differential, and integral calculus, Poisson brackets, as well as vectors/linear algebra. The 'good news' is that readers will receive more than the minimum necessary to understand basic classical physics and the material covers Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetic fields, and basic thermodynamics. The book summarizes a course taught by Susskind to residents living near Stanford - I suspect his attendees are mostly graduate-level engineers.

I ordered this book based on a Wall Street Week-end Journal describing it as a "dummie" approach to understanding Physics. No way at least for me; I have a degree in M.E. and spent most of my career in Engineering, This book is for people who already have a PhD in Theoretial Physics i.e. Like George Gamow or Alfred E et. al. Truly wasted money for anyone with and IQ. of < 150.
I have already donated it to my favorite charity, why I do not know. No one receiving charity could possibly understand starting on page one.