
Classical mechanics worked problems book - forkandwait
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/book.html
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forkandwait
I am currently about to finish Chap 6 on momentum, and working through this
book has been one of the high points of this year for me. I have done all the
problems but one, and I always try first, then look a little bit, then (often)
throw my hands up and just try to memorize the answer. I also makes me tear my
hair and think I am infernally stupid, but hey, it's physics.

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javajosh
You're not stupid, it's just that some of the most intelligent people in the
world have been drawn to the subject, most of which is actually quite new
(consider that the atom was really only discovered in the 20th century!). The
chains of inference are brilliant, and the amazing thing is how teachers treat
the subject as a mundane set of tools to get through problem sets (not that
David Morin does this).

There's this air of understanding that isn't justified. As Feynman famously
pointed out, forget about not understanding quantum mechanics - no-one really
understands _Maxwell 's equations_ because to do so would be to somehow have
an intuition for a function that maps each point in a volume of space to 6
numbers (the 3 components of the E and B vectors at each point). This
intuition is impossible in the general case, but we fool ourselves into
thinking we have that intuition because the pedagogy focuses on special cases.

Anyway, don't be too hard on yourself. You are walking in the footsteps of
some of the greatest minds in human history, and even though they've cleared a
path, the going is still rather steep.

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zentiggr
Logged in just to praise that last sentence... very well put.

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nicolapede
These are books I would have liked to have when I studied Mechanics. Just a
couple of very nice point spotted on chapter 1 of Introduction to Classical
Mechanic: the dimensional analysis example and the linearization of ODEs are
worth the reading.

