- #1
farleyknight
- 146
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Physics books that solve "real world" problems
Ever since I dropped physics last semester, I've been slowly accumulating books to try and find ones that speak to me. I'm a huge skeptic, always have been, and so far, many of them don't make a convincing case. Only one seems to speak to me (Landau's Mechanics) and my lack of education keeps me from reading it further.
Just this afternoon, I began reading the applied section in my diff eq book. I started to get that bad taste in my mouth again, where physics just doesn't make sense. But I kept reading and the author introduced 1) the force of gravity, 2) (okay fine, it's everywhere, big whoop) the force of an object on a spring hanging from a ceiling (okay.. what kind of spring? what kind of object? where on the Earth...? how do I know... baahh!). And then 3) the damping force of the medium. This last one had me pause a bit.
For some reason, I felt less aggravated when he introduced this third force that would account for the resistance of the spring by the surrounding air. I felt as though he wasn't lying to me (as much), and was genuinely trying to model a "real life" scenario. Rarely have I found this to be the case in the books that I've read. Air resistance was mentioned briefly in my original textbook, but we didn't cover it. Otherwise, the books I've seen neglect everything and strip it down to such simple terms that I just don't believe in what they're telling me.
So that combined with another post on the forum has got me thinking: Well, if physics can't prove their laws from first principles, at least do a better job at modeling the environment so it's believable. All this stuff about working in frictionless vacuums makes me doubt physics books.
It would be nice if books could ask questions that stated questions where you were told what materials are being used or what kinds of forces were being applied, or other gorey details that you would have to solve if you were say, MacGauver. I'm sure a guy like that would need physics and would know a good bit about everyday objects to make the problems actually worth while to solving.
Would this make home work sets more complicated? Well, of course.. But wouldn't that make it more "realistic"? I think so. The scenarios I read are half-real, half-abstract, in such a way that my math side rejects it for being too concrete and my real life side rejects it for being too abstract. It's unnerving and hard to focus on the particular parts of the problem.
tl;dr Are their any physics books that describe problems in complete detail? Or do they all try to make it abstract in some way?
Ever since I dropped physics last semester, I've been slowly accumulating books to try and find ones that speak to me. I'm a huge skeptic, always have been, and so far, many of them don't make a convincing case. Only one seems to speak to me (Landau's Mechanics) and my lack of education keeps me from reading it further.
Just this afternoon, I began reading the applied section in my diff eq book. I started to get that bad taste in my mouth again, where physics just doesn't make sense. But I kept reading and the author introduced 1) the force of gravity, 2) (okay fine, it's everywhere, big whoop) the force of an object on a spring hanging from a ceiling (okay.. what kind of spring? what kind of object? where on the Earth...? how do I know... baahh!). And then 3) the damping force of the medium. This last one had me pause a bit.
For some reason, I felt less aggravated when he introduced this third force that would account for the resistance of the spring by the surrounding air. I felt as though he wasn't lying to me (as much), and was genuinely trying to model a "real life" scenario. Rarely have I found this to be the case in the books that I've read. Air resistance was mentioned briefly in my original textbook, but we didn't cover it. Otherwise, the books I've seen neglect everything and strip it down to such simple terms that I just don't believe in what they're telling me.
So that combined with another post on the forum has got me thinking: Well, if physics can't prove their laws from first principles, at least do a better job at modeling the environment so it's believable. All this stuff about working in frictionless vacuums makes me doubt physics books.
It would be nice if books could ask questions that stated questions where you were told what materials are being used or what kinds of forces were being applied, or other gorey details that you would have to solve if you were say, MacGauver. I'm sure a guy like that would need physics and would know a good bit about everyday objects to make the problems actually worth while to solving.
Would this make home work sets more complicated? Well, of course.. But wouldn't that make it more "realistic"? I think so. The scenarios I read are half-real, half-abstract, in such a way that my math side rejects it for being too concrete and my real life side rejects it for being too abstract. It's unnerving and hard to focus on the particular parts of the problem.
tl;dr Are their any physics books that describe problems in complete detail? Or do they all try to make it abstract in some way?