Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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 (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! Library Picks reviews always buys the books we review and has nothing to do with authors, publishers or Amazon, our focus is exclusively on the ROI of Amazon buyers.