Should I use Morin or Kleppner and Kolenkow

[Physicaa]

I'm not really sure which one to use. Also, where does one go after that ? Taylor ? Symon?

Thank you!

 

[bcrowell]

Morin has a better and more modern treatment of relativity. K&K is extremely old, and the 2nd edition is not really much of an update.

K&K's agenda is basically to get students going on differential equations and vector calculus, possibly without having formally seen those topics in a math class yet. It has lots of challenging problems. If you can do the problems, you know you have a solid freshman mechanics background. I had the book as my freshman physics book in college, but I haven't taught from it. It's designed for people who have an extremely strong background in math, and realistically they should also have had high school physics.

I haven't learned or taught from Morin, but its agenda seems to be to introduce topics like Lagragians that are normally not encountered until upper-division mechanics. I don't really understand why this would be desirable.

Both of these are books designed for physics majors in an honors course at an elite university.

Just curious, why are you self-studying instead of taking a course?

 

[Physicaa]

Morin has a better and more modern treatment of relativity. K&K is extremely old, and the 2nd edition is not really much of an update.

K&K's agenda is basically to get students going on differential equations and vector calculus, possibly without having formally seen those topics in a math class yet. It has lots of challenging problems. If you can do the problems, you know you have a solid freshman mechanics background. I had the book as my freshman physics book in college, but I haven't taught from it. It's designed for people who have an extremely strong background in math, and realistically they should also have had high school physics.

I haven't learned or taught from Morin, but its agenda seems to be to introduce topics like Lagragians that are normally not encountered until upper-division mechanics. I don't really understand why this would be desirable.

Both of these are books designed for physics majors in an honors course at an elite university.

Just curious, why are you self-studying instead of taking a course?

I'm not in University yet. (It works differently where I am) And I have no idea where I'm going later on but I like learning physics so I wanted to do some things on my own and not waste time. I did do introductory Mechanics (Not that sophisticated, mainly algebra based) I want to understand Physics, not just do some formulas and plug in numbers.

 

[vanhees71]

I'd recommend to have a look at the Feynman lectures, which are just great to understand physics. They are online for free:

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/