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.
Physicsforums 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 .
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)
I 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.)
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/ or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up 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 for more of that sort of stuff.
Hi 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 ?
[+] [-] mjfl|8 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-...
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4e-David...
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-Dav...
[+] [-] musgravepeter|8 years ago|reply
Lectures by Susskind for people who know (or have forgotten) some calculus and always wanted to know more about physics.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technofire|8 years ago|reply
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
[2] "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character
http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd
[+] [-] ad510|8 years ago|reply
general relativity: 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
standard model: http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diaga...
conceptual core of quantum mechanics: http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
history of quantum mechanics: "The Second Creation" and "The Infinity Puzzle"
[+] [-] mainmeister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|8 years ago|reply
Can anyone recommend any documentaries or videos?
[+] [-] DrScump|8 years ago|reply
"Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve."
It doesn't cover Quantum Mechanics that I recall.
[+] [-] louthy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanb|8 years ago|reply
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=... )
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
[+] [-] bkohlmann|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drostie|8 years ago|reply
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/... .
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/ or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up 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 for more of that sort of stuff.
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
Also, out of curiosity do you know non English books of rare quality ?
[+] [-] kapauldo|8 years ago|reply