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I have no doubt that visual is better than text-only and austere, by any metric, except one: filtering out those with less commitment. Laundau himself didn't h
by trott 3y ago
I have no doubt that visual is better than text-only and austere, by any metric, except one: filtering out those with less commitment.
Laundau himself didn't have much patience for struggling to understand dense language, according to Ioffe's account:
"Landau knew well all subjects (despite the fact that he almost did not read papers, only listened to their presentations) and put questions which had to be immediately and definitely answered -- general words or statements like “the author claims ...” were not accepted."
That said, Landau's Theoretical Physics textbook is graduate-level. Feynman wrote an undergraduate Physics textbook. And some other things Feynman wrote might have been for even wider audiences.
- nologic01 3y agoMy hunch is this filter would be particularly bad for true talent but would be quite good to populate the workhorse ranks. Which would not a small feat. Underneath the exalted world of Class I scientists that open new vistas, the bread and butter in any field is the adaptation and application of techniques to "nearby" problems. Curiously there isnt a complete graduate level physics textbook collection in the modern style. Only individual examples here and there from different authors. With the heyday of physics and textbooks behind us its unlikely we see that ever happening.
- cyber_kinetist 3y agoFeynman wrote at least one book aimed at the graduate level, “Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals”: https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Path-Integrals-Emended/dp/0486477223 https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Path-Integrals-Emen... Haven’t really read it so don’t know if its lucidity matches his undergraduate series.
- beezle 3y agoIt is a good book, have it in hard cover. Feynman indirectly wrote quite a few graduate level texts such as The Theory of Fundamental Processes, Statistical Mechanics Lecture Notes and Photon-hadron Interactions which are compilations of lecture notes re-written in book form. There is also one on gravitation dating to the early 1960s.