For those interested, Leonard susskin video course in stanford ( can be found anywhere ) on classical mechanics is one of the most beautiful piece of intellectual material i've ever been given the chance to see.
I absolutely agree. I hit the first chapter of SICM like a brick wall on my first attempt, but after watching Susskind's lectures I found it far easier to understand (although it is still a very difficult book!)
Yes, it was amazing. The good news is that it was turned into a book, The Theoretical Minimum. The bad news is that the book was really disappointing. I'm more of a learn-by-reading than learn-by-watching person, but Susskind's lectures are amazing.
I don't think a book could ever compare to 20 hours of classroom video when you've got the chance to have such a great professor. The pace, repititions, emphasis, hands gesture, hesitations, pauses, are also helping you understand and digest the course ( as with every human communication). Frankly what Mr susskind has done with this stanford program is truely the work of a great man.
Susskind won't teach you things like friction, drag, or elasticity. But, he will teach you some of the most profound theoretical insights of modern physics.
Lewin won't teach you Euler-Lagrange Equations, or Noether's Theorem. But, he will teach you how to think about solving practical physics problems.
FLOP and Susskind's Theoretical Minimum are similar in that they both aim to teach an intuition of theoretical physics, rather than training one to do calculate the solutions of particular physics problems. So, they are similar in that respect.
The key difference that I noticed is that Feynman's intention is to explain nature, and he tends to avoid relying too heavily on the mathematics as part of that explanation.
Susskind's focus is on raw abstractions themselves, often independent of the physical phenomena that are being abstracted. His intent is to exaplain the mathematics, and to give you an intuition and appreciation for the beauty of those abstractions.
For example, Feynman shows you the Lorenz Transformations and says "this is the stuff that is needed to make Maxwell's Equations work out the same to a moving observer." On the other hand, Susskind starts with the notion that light has the same velocity in all reference frames, and uses this to derive the Lorenz Transformations algebraically.
I haven't read Penrose, so I can't comment on that.
If you've got an ipad, i recommend using itunes univeristy to download all the courses. I've spent a whole summer watching those under a tree. Most memorable online course experience you can dream of.
