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Book Recommendations For Maths To Astrophysics?

Posted by kdawson on from the take-a-left-at-newton dept.

sexy_flying_yoda writes "I have just graduated from 3 years doing a BSc in Mathematics in the UK and will be beginning an MSc in Astrophysics and Astronomy in September. I have very limited knowledge in physics, and as my new course of study is basically physics, I'm currently searching for books that will enable me to get up to speed. What books would you recommend that would help a mathematics graduate convert to a physicist?"

7 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Pop-Sci but well worth it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can heartily recommend "The road to reality" by Roger Penrose, there'll be a lot of stuff that's old-news to a math major, but it's essentially an undergraduate course in mathematical-physics for the lay-reader (of course this normally means scientist from another discipline :-)

    Best of luck!

    1. Re:Pop-Sci but well worth it... by efagerho · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I would assume that what he wants is a physics textbook that assumes that you're very fluent in math (not a book about handwaving), thus making the presentation a lot more dense, thus faster... I'm myself a Ph.D. student in math and I've tried to find such a book myself. It's very booring to read physics books that really do calculations the hard way (e.g. use pages to do something with matrices that directly follows from a theorem concerning linear operators etc.). Unfortunately, I don't think such books exists...

    2. Re:Pop-Sci but well worth it... by Beetle+B. · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Quantum mechanics: R. Shankar, "Principals of Quantum Mechanics" (the first few chapters should give you a basic foundation of the theory).

      In my undergrad, a physics professor told me, "There's no particularly good book on QM". I thought he was being pedantic, but years later I found out he was actually correct. Every book has some serious deficiency (serious if that's the only book you learned it from). I've read only the first few chapters of Shankar, and they're quite decent - I liked them. I tried reading some of the stuff later in the book and didn't feel he did justice to them (either too brief on the topic or hand-waving). Another problem with Shankar is that it doesn't really challenge the reader.

      I can't exactly recommend a QM book, as I learned it from my professor's lecture notes - which were awesome. But from memory, he consulted a bunch when he wrote them. They included the books by Messiah, Davydov, Landau & Lifshitz, Baym.

      At the undergrad level (in case you did not learn it during your BSc), two common books are the ones by Griffith and Liboff. Again, both have weaknesses but they do complement one another well.

      Electricity and Magnetism: D. Griffiths, "Introduction to Electrodynamics"

      Best undergrad book on the topic ever. Well worth reading for its insights even if you think you know E&M very well.

      In the US, at the grad level the standard is the book by Jackson. I hear in some countries they sometimes use that in the final year of undergrad. It's a standard and a must if your program requires you to know EM.

      In general, people speak very highly of the series by Landau & Lifshitz. Might want to keep them as references and read them at some point.

      --
      Beetle B.
    3. Re:Pop-Sci but well worth it... by ClassMyAss · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While I mostly agree with you, I'd still suggest picking up "The Road To Reality," as it's a truly fun read, if for no other reason than that Penrose is just a little bit nuts - he's got to be the first person ever to manage to get a "layman's" (i.e. it shows up at Barnes and Noble) book to include detailed calculations involving tensor calculus... Beyond that, though, he really looks at everything in a different light, and in a very non-standard order, so I think it's 100% worthwhile. The 1000 page thing is annoying (too big to fit alongside your laptop in your bag, to be sure), but as a physics PhD all you're going to be doing is reading and calculating all day anyways, so that shouldn't be a very large deterrent.

  2. Re:Try the classics by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm afraid I'm old enough to have read both of them when they were first published, which probably colors my view. While I'll admit that neither of them contains any "useful" (i.e: applicable) science per se, I have to say that they were both "mind expanding"/"eye opening" regarding physics.

    Tao taught me that where there was nothing (literally no thing), there could suddenly be a few particles which would almost instantaneously annihilate themselves, to leave "no thing" behind. The notion of the quantum ground state "bubbling" like that has never left me.

    Wu Li (admittedly the fluffier of the two) demonstrated that commutativity does not apply to the real world, particularly in regards to electromagnetic radiation (polarization). I remain flabbergasted by this notion.

    Sure, they're both "popular" science, but if you read them with an open mind, and let it wander, you'll find yourself pondering some of the wonder in physics.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  3. It's all maths anyway... by Bazman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I did a BSc in Physics with Astrophysics, and the astro classes were more maths than even my friends who were doing maths had in their mathiest maths classes.

    For our stellar structure course the lecturer used every letter of the alphabet in his equations. Upper and lower case. Latin and Greek. He may even have sneaked in an aleph when we weren't looking (which was often). We used to test ourselves by someone picking a random letter, say 'p' and someone else going 'partial gas pressure!' or whatever it was.

    Okay, I suppose the equations were all based on physical properties of fusion plasmas, but with a maths degree you shouldn't have any trouble with the numbers.

    Good to see people calling it 'maths' and not 'math' in this thread - I don't think the USA has woken up yet :)

  4. Re:jump right into the upper level books by habig · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wish I had mod points here. Goldstein, Sakurai, and Griffiths are the books the questioner missed while taking a math degree instead of a physics degree. Throw in Carrol & Ostlie for the astrophysics side of things, and he's covered.

    However, I disagree about the "skimming" part. The only way any of these things will be useful is if you actually work through some of the problems. Do a few random problems from each chapter and they'll make a whole heck of a lot more sense.