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Ask HN: What are your favorite physics sites, documentaries, books?
I'm suddenly very interested again in how the micro and macro are connected by laws of nature. I find the history of physics, as well as the characters, and insights fascinating. I could talk about it all day. I lost this passion for a few years but it's reemerging again.
- technofire 9y ago> as well as the characters While I cannot recommend any books on physics itself, I can recommend a couple light reads on Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist (links below). Each is structured as a series of short autobiographical stories so they're very easy reads that shed light on some of Feynman's life, both within and without academia. [1] Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5 http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5 [2] "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd
- DrScump 9y agoA classic documentary is "Einstein's Universe", where a layman (Peter Ustinov, iirc) is introduced to Relativity. "Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve." It doesn't cover Quantum Mechanics that I recall.
- QAPereo 9y agoPhysicsforums iS A pretty fantastic place to go, if you have a specific question or if you just want to read all of the answers to questions from people who actually know what they're talking about. It also has the benefit of very strong moderation, so it's not the Reddit experience .
- louthy 9y agoFavourite book: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Richard Feynman
- mistermann 9y agoRelated question: why is there so little documentary content on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann considering his significance and how recently in history he lived?? Can anyone recommend any documentaries or videos?
- mjfl 9y agoDavid Griffiths is an excellent author if you're not afraid of math. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/1107179866/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-3&keywords=david+griffiths https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-... https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4e-David-Griffiths/dp/9332550441/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-4&keywords=david+griffiths https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4e-David... https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-David-Griffiths/dp/3527406018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-1&keywords=david+griffiths https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-Dav...
- musgravepeter 9y agohttp://theoreticalminimum.com/ http://theoreticalminimum.com/ Lectures by Susskind for people who know (or have forgotten) some calculus and always wanted to know more about physics.
- mainmeister 9y agoI love the video site https://curiositystream.com https://curiositystream.com
- bkohlmann 9y agoThe Black Hole War by Susskind
- drostie 9y agoI 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/sicm/book.html 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/ http://theoreticalminimum.com/ or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA 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 http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose for more of that sort of stuff.
- agumonkey 9y agoHi 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 ?
- evanb 9y agoI broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts. CULTURAL Einstein - Essays in Humanism Frayn - Copenhagen Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think? de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics Macaulay - The Way Things Work Paulos - Innumeracy Sagan - Cosmos Sagan - Broca's Brain Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World Salam - Science in the Third World Seife - Zero Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight POPULAR Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics) Feynman - The Meaning of It All Feynman - Lectures on Physics Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field Hawking - A Brief History of Time Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science Polya - How to Solve It Schrödinger - What is Life? Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum Susskind - Quantum Mechanics Wallace - Everything And More Weinberg - The First Three Minutes Wiener - God & Golem, Inc. TEXTS Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=PCRKMZ9sg_&dq=evan+berkowitz+democritus+aaronson&pg=PR31&hl=en#v=onepage&q=evan%20berkowitz%20democritus%20aaronson&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... ) Abelson and Sussman - SICP Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2) Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation Feynman - Feynman's Thesis Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals Fermi - Thermodynamics Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko) Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable) Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together) Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell
- ad510 9y agospecial relativity: http://onestick.com/relativity http://onestick.com/relativity general relativity: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html quantum electrodynamics: "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" or http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 standard model: http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diagams http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diaga... conceptual core of quantum mechanics: http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html history of quantum mechanics: "The Second Creation" and "The Infinity Puzzle"
- kapauldo 9y agoBig bang by Simon Singh is great but it's pop physics of that matters. It's excellent.