Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
alok-g · 2024-03-31 · Original thread
Self-learning via books. I've bought a bunch. Am currently going through Susskind's Theoretical Minimum Classical Mechanics [1], also looking through No Nonsense Classical Mechanics [2].

AI chatbots sometimes come to rescue when I am stuck. Not with mathematics though.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Mechanics-Theoretical-Georg...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/No-Nonsense-Classical-Mechanics-Stude...

formalsystem · 2020-05-12 · Original thread
This is a great book but a bit dense first. At a high level it goes through physics with an optimization viewpoint, as in find the actions that minimize a system's energy to figure out how a system will evolve.

I would strongly suggest you learn Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics from this book first [1] since it comes with many more illustrations and simple arguments that'll make reading SICM much easier. If you don't have time to read a whole book and want to get the main idea I've written a blog post about Lagragian mechanics myself [2] which has made it to the front page of Hacker News before. The great thing about SICM is that it's a physics textbook where the formulas are replaced by code [3] which you means you can play around with your assumptions to gain intuition for how everything works.

IMO I believe in introductory physics we overemphasize formalism over intuition and playing around with simulators is a truer way to explore physics since most physical laws were derived via experimentation not derivation. Another book that really drives this point home is [4]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Jakob-Schwichtenberg/dp/1096195380/re...

[2] https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-turn-physics-into-an-opti...

[3] https://github.com/hnarayanan/sicm

[4] https://natureofcode.com/

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