
Ask HN: What are your favorite physics sites, documentaries, books? - good_vibes
I&#x27;m suddenly very interested again in how the micro and macro are connected by laws of nature. I find the history of physics, as well as the characters, and insights fascinating. I could talk about it all day. I lost this passion for a few years but it&#x27;s reemerging again.
======
mjfl
David Griffiths is an excellent author if you're not afraid of math.

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-
David-...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-
Griffiths/dp/1107179866/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-3&keywords=david+griffiths)

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-
Electrodynamics-4e-David...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-
Electrodynamics-4e-David-
Griffiths/dp/9332550441/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-4&keywords=david+griffiths)

[https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-
Dav...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-David-
Griffiths/dp/3527406018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-1&keywords=david+griffiths)

------
musgravepeter
[http://theoreticalminimum.com/](http://theoreticalminimum.com/)

Lectures by Susskind for people who know (or have forgotten) some calculus and
always wanted to know more about physics.

------
QAPereo
Physicsforums iS A pretty fantastic place to go, if you have a specific
question or if you just want to read all of the answers to questions from
people who actually know what they're talking about. It also has the benefit
of very strong moderation, so it's not the Reddit experience .

------
technofire
> as well as the characters

While I cannot recommend any books on physics itself, I can recommend a couple
light reads on Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist (links
below). Each is structured as a series of short autobiographical stories so
they're very easy reads that shed light on some of Feynman's life, both within
and without academia.

[1] Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)

[http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5](http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5)

[2] "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a
Curious Character

[http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd](http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd)

------
ad510
special relativity:
[http://onestick.com/relativity](http://onestick.com/relativity)

general relativity:
[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html)

quantum electrodynamics: "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" or
[http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8](http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8)

standard model: [http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-
diaga...](http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diagams)

conceptual core of quantum mechanics:
[http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html](http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html)

history of quantum mechanics: "The Second Creation" and "The Infinity Puzzle"

------
mainmeister
I love the video site
[https://curiositystream.com](https://curiositystream.com)

------
mistermann
Related question: why is there so little documentary content on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann)
considering his significance and how recently in history he lived??

Can anyone recommend any documentaries or videos?

------
DrScump
A classic documentary is "Einstein's Universe", where a layman (Peter Ustinov,
iirc) is introduced to Relativity.

"Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve."

It doesn't cover Quantum Mechanics that I recall.

------
louthy
Favourite book: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Richard Feynman

------
evanb
I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc),
popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

CULTURAL

Einstein - Essays in Humanism

Frayn - Copenhagen

Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

Macaulay - The Way Things Work

Paulos - Innumeracy

Sagan - Cosmos

Sagan - Broca's Brain

Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

Salam - Science in the Third World

Seife - Zero

Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

POPULAR

Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about
fungibility in quantum mechanics)

Feynman - The Meaning of It All

Feynman - Lectures on Physics

Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

Polya - How to Solve It

Schrödinger - What is Life?

Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

Wallace - Everything And More

Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

TEXTS

Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with
me in the acknowledgements
[https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=PCRKMZ9sg_&dq=evan+berkowitz+democritus+aaronson&pg=PR31&hl=en#v=onepage&q=evan%20berkowitz%20democritus%20aaronson&f=false)
)

Abelson and Sussman - SICP

Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in
Statistical Physics

Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

Fermi - Thermodynamics

Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in
CGS---is preferable)

Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies
and the editors put his notes together)

Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

------
bkohlmann
The Black Hole War by Susskind

------
drostie
I help out on Physics Stack Exchange and the Freenode ##physics channel can
still be nicely active sometimes, though not as active as ##math is.

If you want that sort of story, one textbook that you might incredibly like
would be Griffiths' _Introduction to Elementary Particles_ , which has a very
readable first section going into the history of how we came to have the
Standard Model that we have today, some names of who discovered what, etc.

A. Zee's _Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell_ is also very nice for getting a
sort of pleasant appreciation for quantum field theory if you've got some
mathematical background.

It also depends on what you take for granted as a baseline. If you can find
Feynman's New Zealand lectures, for example, you will notice that he
deliberately avoids introducing explicit complex numbers or explicit
integration, and still manages to convey what both of those mathematical
formalisms allow the theory to do. (There are also some little gems. Like, if
you pay attention to the part where he says something like "I wish I had
brought an example of one of these surfaces where we've erased lines of the
mirror so that I could show you" \-- then you're in the right position to say,
"holy crap, I understand the rainbows that I see in the bottom of CDs/DVDs
now!" after a second.)

Sussman of Lisp fame went on to write The Structure and Interpretation of
Classical Mechanics,
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html)
.

I'd be remiss if I did not mention that the father of String Theory is on a
quest to provide everyone with the education needed to appreciate the current
theories of physics; see
[http://theoreticalminimum.com/](http://theoreticalminimum.com/) or just look
up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA)
.

If you really want cutting-edge sometimes-somewhat-unbelievable stuff, the
Perimeter Institute publishes their lectures-for-the-public online; you might
for example really like Penrose's idea that maybe someday when all the black
holes have evaporated, all of the particles become massless and they no longer
experience time so we can just evolve the system to t=infinity after some
finite time: so we discover that what we get as our boundary at infinity could
be conformally rescaled to something resembling a t=0 Big Bang -- a "conformal
cyclic cosmology". See
[http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose](http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose)
for more of that sort of stuff.

~~~
agumonkey
Hi drostie, you read SICM ? I'm still wondering how good it is, it felt mind
blowing for a CS guy, but it's so rarely mentioned that I thought it was more
like an exercise by the author.

Also, out of curiosity do you know non English books of rare quality ?

~~~
drostie
Hey, sorry this took me a while to respond to -- I have a script which polls
HN to custom-order the posts I see, so I am not often on the main site.

SICM is basically a mainline classical mechanics textbook of the form that I
was able to do my Bachelor's in, but combined with some tantalizing snippets
of Lisp code which make it seem like there's something deeply interesting
there, too. There's a magical feeling where you're like "holy crap if I could
nail down the mathematical notation a little more and get some of these
routines as efficient library built-ins, this would be like a programming
sandbox that could teach a student physics by direct interaction."

------
kapauldo
Big bang by Simon Singh is great but it's pop physics of that matters. It's
excellent.

