Recent content by patrickd

Peter, thanks for replying. "A physicist's level of rigor" could be a laughable oxymoron (if you are a mathematician), just the right amount (if you are an undergraduate physics major), or a level well above one's head (if you are me.) I'm not a physicist (I'm an ophthalmologist), so a level...

A year of college calculus gets you into, maybe, the early 1800's in terms of offering some mathematical insight into physics. The literature attempting to educate us non-scientists on developments thereafter tends to rely on words alone, the authors apparently agreeing with their editors that...

QuarkCharmer: "I haven't been able to find any other Physics II (intro to EM, gauss law, that sort of thing) videos online." http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magnetism-spring-2002/index.htm

I believe that the more advanced topics require math for a deep level of understanding. The language in which the concepts exist is, after all, mathematics. Since pop-sci authors are nearly always dissuaded by their editors from including math, they are left to use human language to explain...

... amazing that they were published only two weeks apart (read the descriptions)! In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World, by Ian Stewart https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465029736/?tag=pfamazon01-20 The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told...

Many popularized accounts of the development of quantum theory generally go like this: • Maxwell shows that all electromagnetic radiation is a variant of one phenomenon. • Experimental results measuring black body radiation are inconsistent with the radiation theory as understood. • Planck...

The link given by Phyzguy is not working. Is there an alternate?

The submerged ball has buoyancy. The ball cannot tell that it is on a rotating frame; for all it knows, there is a gravitational field pulling it in the direction of the bucket's wall. It trys to "float" in the opposite direction. There is a similar thought experiment out there involving a...

"Fundamentals of Mathematics." By Moses Richardson. 1960's ed., Newer edition (70's, I think) in collaboration with Leonard Richardson (Moses' son, I presume.) Long out of print, available used through Amazon $14.95 or thereabouts. This book is described exactly by your request, and, as an...

Does anyone know of a treatment of Lagrangian and/or Hamiltonian mechanics that would be accessible to someone who is (or was, about forty years ago) reasonably fluent in elementary calculus and Newtonian mechanics? I am less interested in a college textbook than in an overview a la Brian...

It is my understanding that the Equivalence Principle postulates that if I were standing in a closed room, I would not be able to distinguish whether the downward force that I felt was caused by (1) the presence of a massive body such as the Earth exerting a downward gravitational force or (2)...