

Writing Physics - DaniFong
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/~cew2/KnightLecture.html

======
kurtosis
So this is why Mermin and Ashcroft's Solid State Physics has been one of the
standard graduate texts for the field since it was published in '76.

According to Wikipedia Lev Landau ranked physicists on a log scale - Newton
was 0, Einstein 1 and Mermin placed himself on the scale at a 4.5

~~~
mechanical_fish
To call Ashcroft and Mermin the standard text is actually to understate its
awesomeness. That book saved my bacon in grad school, more than once.

Ashcroft has a rather different personality from Mermin, but he's also a great
lecturer. I took his graduate stat mech class. Man, do I wish there were
videos of that, or at least a textbook.

~~~
kurtosis
Whoa, that's awesome! My advisor got to take Emag from J.D. Jackson himself -
Taking a course from the author of a famous text is truly the kind of thing
that you get permanent bragging rights about.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I have a (rather battered) signed copy of Jackson. Some friends of mine in
grad school heard he was coming to town for some physics seminar, so we all
went to the Ithaca airport, waited for him to come in, and got his autograph.

Man, was that my all-time personal peak of geekiness. Jackson himself was
quite bemused.

If we're going to name-drop great physics teachers and texts, though, let me
recommend Roald Hoffman. His course in bonding in solids was my favorite
science course ever -- and he even wrote a book! ("Solids and Surfaces") It
was the highest-numbered course in the chemistry department -- the one where
chemistry and physics become aspects of the same thing -- and he used a
deliberately simplified but intuitively clear computational model and a great
many examples to give you a mental picture of how bonding works, and how band
structure is a special case of chemical bonding. One of these days I've got to
reread that book.

Amusingly, I signed up and took Hoffman's course without even knowing, at the
time, that the guy had won a Nobel prize and hosted a PBS series. Cornell
could work that way sometimes.

(God, textbooks are criminally priced. I just discovered that my copy of
_Solids and Surfaces_ is worth $100, _used_ , on Amazon. That's awful. As if
recommending graduate-level science textbooks wasn't hard enough...)

------
gjm11
Mermin's book "Boojums all the way through" (mostly about writing about
physics, the same topic as this lecture) is well worth reading.

------
Herring
I take it he's never written abstracts before? This article desperately needs
one.

~~~
gamache
It's not an article, it's a lecture transcription.

