DJ Strouse

My Goodreads Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Those who follow the pack waste days wrinkling their foreheads at the long, winding, historical path through quantum mechanics that David Griffiths leads his unsuspecting followers on. Those who know better skip the foreplay and face the glorious intellectual burden that are the axioms of quantum mechanics in just the second chapter of Shankar.

Shankar’s introductory chapter on the mathematics of quantum theory is the best out there. It was my saving grace after getting bogged down in a quantum information book for which I went in unprepared. If you too have lept into papers or books only to be baffled by the mysterious dances of Dirac brackets and quantum operators, let Shankar be your guide.

Shankar is also great for the independent learner. He embeds problems within the text so if you’re reading on your own, you can feel as though you’re engaged in the development of the theory (but don’t kid yourself, you’re not that smart).

I don’t see why this book isn’t far more popular. It’s not only clear enough for undergrads (and, more specifically, clearer than Griffiths historical tour), but it covers many of the topics you’d want to see in any introductory grad level course too.

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My Goodreads Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Trying to teach undergrads general relativity is about as easy as teaching a puppy… general relativity. Hartle strikes a pretty good balance with this book, offering 30-page chapters with *gasp* only a half-dozen equations that focus on conveying high-level concepts as well as chapters fully devoted to tensors, covariant derivatives, and all the mathematical weapons one needs to predict the large-scale structure of the universe. Hartle also provides plenty of worked examples, which are really useful for understanding how to go about GR calculations (which are a new beast for most undergrads unfamiliar with tensor algebra).

When your subject matter includes black holes, wormholes, and space travel, it would be difficult not to make up examples that make a young physicist wriggle with glee, but Hartle does do an especially good job of providing engaging problems (e.g. about space pirates patrolling black hole horizons).

However, I too often felt like a child touring a farm and being hushed and rushed past the slaughterhouse; there always seemed to be something more complicated going on behind the scenes that Hartle wasn’t telling me about. The book moved very (too?) slowly at first but halfway through the book, I felt like I had skipped a few sections. This uneasy feeling is perhaps expected on a first voyage through interstellar spacetime, but I’m eager for a less-nauseating return trip, during which I can spend more time appreciating the view.

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Tags:   cosmology · einstein · general relativity · physics · science · textbooksNo Comments.

My Goodreads Rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book has a nasty habit of mistaking naming for explaining, but it served the purpose of introducing an egghead physicist/mathematician to the messy biological world of neuroscience. If nothing else, its convincing evidence that neuroscience needs theorists.

If (Amount of jargon) > (Space in a human brain),
then FindTheorists.

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Tags:   brains · neuroscience · textbooksNo Comments.