The Theoretical Minimum, Released today, January 29th 2013

gehrab

I have absolutely no idea. I suppose it is related to the fact that I have no degrees, but I do physics anyways. In fact, that is the whole point of the book and those to follow; you can do theoretical physics so long as you have studied and mastered the ideas and techniques.

jedishrfu

I've gotten to page 66 or thereabouts in lecture 3 on Dynamics. I like the exposition. As a former student of physics, I used to wonder about how to properly measure force. The spring example is good and realizing that Hooke law doesn't apply to all springs (not explicitly mentioned), the issue is sidestepped by defining a single unit and using instead multiple identical springs was a clever way to sidestep the issue.

I found a couple of things so far:

p9: 3 lines up from the bottom, the sentence says: There is evan ... which I think you mean "even"

p20: it would help to explicitly label the arc saying its length = radius or to use some small countable tick like five on the radius and five on the arc. It confused me for a moment.

p24: R vector in the diagram lines up with the bounding box edge and the X axis which breaks the 3D effect you were trying for.

p28: exercise #4 has an unnecessary hyphen in the word mag- nitude probably due to some typesetting issue with using a box frame around the text.

gehrab

Thank you.

jedishrfu

Okay I got a little further along in the book when I finally caught the joke.

The opening of each lecture is a dialog between George and Lenny which I took to mean the two main character in Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men

but then I realized that they were references to the two authors.

So my next thought is:

I sure hope George doesn't

gehrab

No worries, it is loosely based on Steinbeck, but the real Lenny needs no help in the physics from me...