Fundamentals of Physics I: Mechanics, Relativity, and Thermodynamics

The Open Yale Courses Series

by Ramamurti Shankar

A beloved introductory physics textbook, now including exercises and an answer key, explains the concepts essential for thorough scientific understanding
 
In this concise book, R. Shankar, a well‑known physicist and contagiously enthusiastic educator, explains the essential concepts of Newtonian mechanics, special relativity, waves, fluids, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Now in an expanded edition—complete with problem sets and answers for course use or self‑study—this work provides an ideal introduction for college‑level students of physics, chemistry, and engineering; for AP Physics students; and for general readers interested in advances in the sciences. The book begins at the simplest level, develops the basics, and reinforces fundamentals, ensuring a solid foundation in the principles and methods of physics.

Genres: Physics, Science, Textbooks, Nonfiction, Mathematics, Education, Reference

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Ramamurti Shankar (born April 28, 1947) is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. His research is in theoretical condensed matter physics, although he is also known for his earlier work in theoretical particle physics. In 2009, Shankar was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society for "innovative applications of field theoretic techniques to quantum condensed matter systems". He received his B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1974). After three years at the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined the Yale physics department, which he chaired between 2001-2007. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is dedicated to teaching and has published three texts: Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Basic Training in Mathematics: A Fitness Program for Science Students and Fundamentals of Physics.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I threw a gorilla at you, its color and mood would not matter. These are things that do not affect the physics.

After blundering through Susskind’s two Theoretical Minimum books, and getting a taste of Feynman’s lectures, I decided that it was time I buckle down and read an introductory textbook. After all, I felt a little foolish trying to learn quantum mechanics and relativity without knowing very much about the basics. But which textbook? College textbooks are typically nightmarishly expensive; what’s more, most of them I’ve read are simply awful. Thankfully this book is free of both sins: it is cheap and high quality.

Like Susskind’s and Feynman’s books, this book originated as a series of lectures. In fact, if you don’t feel like buying and reading the book, you can still find Shankar’s lectures online, free of charge, at the Open Yale Courses site; there are also some supplementary materials, such as exercises and class exams, if you’re interested. This book preserves some of the flavor of the lectures; it is broken up into digestible chapters, which can be read, with some effort, in an hour or so. It is fast paced; considering its relatively small size, it covers a remarkable amount of material. Partly, this is because the diagrams are all in black and white; and all of the exercises are online, not in the book.

Shankar himself is an amiable fellow. He likes to pepper his lessons with jokes. I suspect that many will find the jokes a bit corny; I personally like corny humor, so I appreciated it. As a teacher, he is basically quite good. (I’ll do some nitpicking in a bit.) He is unpretentious, focused, and enthusiastic. So, considering all this—the comprehensiveness, the cheap price, the high quality, the lighthearted teacher—I can’t help but say that this is an excellent product, ideal for people in my position, trying to teach themselves introductory college physics.

I must admit that I struggled during some parts of this book. It’s not that it was too difficult, per se (the math presupposed is basic calculus and trigonometry, and Shankar teaches you whatever else you need). It was simply the amount of material. To achieve mastery of the contents of each lecture would require that I seriously drill myself; I would have to force myself to take detailed notes, make flashcards, dutifully solve exercises—in short, to replicate the experience of a real college class. I wasn’t willing to do this; the amount of time required wasn’t commensurate with the depth of my interest. Still, I managed to follow along, and, in spite of myself, to learn a great deal. My favorite chapters were the ones on Special Relativity, Waves, and Thermodynamics.

The problem with learning physics, I found, was that fully understanding the sexy stuff requires mastery of the boring and tedious stuff. In fact, I would like to formalize my dilemma with an equation. Let S be the sexiness; D the difficulty; E the effort; M the level of mastery achieved; and t the time.

Mastery is the product of the level of effort and the time spent studying:

M = Et

Effort, in turn, is got by dividing the sexiness by the difficulty:

E = S/D

The problem is that the sexiness is proportional to the difficulty. So, contrary to what you would expect, lowering the difficulty doesn’t necessarily lead to more effort, since you are also lowering the sexiness. As a result, the effort level remains fairly constant throughout.

Now, I want to complain a bit about Shankar’s presentation of the material. Shankar is, as I said, an unpretentious fellow; he never uses a difficult word where an easy one will do; he is not trying to intimidate or show off, but is doing his best to communicate with the students. Still, despite Shankar’s plain style, sometimes he could be a bit obscure. Consider the following example. Here, Shankar is pulling a spring to the right, to length A away from the center equilibrium point; he wants to know the leftmost point it will reach when released, which is called A'. The force of friction is called f; and the spring constant (the strength of the spring) is called k. Here it is (with an added gloss from me):

A’ = –A + 2f/k.

As we crank up f/k from 0 to A, A’ starts moving rightward from x = –A and turns positive when we pass f/k = A/2. That is, the final point now lies at positive x: the oscillator never even makes it back to the equilibrium point. Raising f further, we reach the limiting case f/k = A when the nontrivial solution coalesces with the trivial one [i.e. when there’s no force from the spring]: the mass never leaves x = A since the spring force, at its very maximum of kA, exactly equals the frictional force.

If you’re like me, the above paragraph doesn’t make it exactly clear what’s happening; yet he’s saying something very simple. Basically, as f/k increases (which happens when the force of friction increases, since the spring constant isn’t changing), the spring travels less and less far. If there’s quite a bit of friction, as compared with the strength of the spring, it won’t even reach the midway point; and if there’s a great deal of friction, it won’t move at all, but will be held in place by the force of friction. It’s exceedingly intuitive; yet with Shankar’s presentation, you’re left with algebra.

This is a consistent feature of Shankar’s teaching style: he is theoretical physicist, and tends to think mathematically, so his explanations verge on the algebraic, instead of talking about physical examples. Still, I think this is a fairly minor complaint, as his explanations are generally clear and engaging. Nevertheless, this book could use some editing and organizing. The writing style approximates the tone of a lecture a little too well; it can be wordy at times, and it sometimes isn't clear what the major take-home equations are in a given section.

As a parting thought, reading this book made me think about science education in general. It’s a tough business educating anybody; and modern science has its own challenges. The basic tension, as I see it, is between teaching students the body of knowledge, and instilling the students with the spirit of scientific discovery. On the one hand, you don’t want civil engineers out there who haven’t mastered their physics—this would be bad. So it’s important to have students master our current understanding of the universe. On the other hand, science is not itself a body of knowledge, but a procedure and a mentality, a way of investigating the world. As soon as a body of knowledge calcifies into a dogma, it is no longer science. So for future physicists, it seems more important to encourage them to think creatively about problems, to design and interpret experiments, to come up with new theories.

I don’t think there’s any perfect solution to the problem. Still, something about the existence of mass-produced textbooks, filled with the same standard equations, taught to equivalent classes all around the country, makes me feel uneasy. There’s something rather homogenizing and overly mathematical about the whole affair. After all, the bored student, who figures out how to take apart and modify his pencil sharpener, is doing something much closer to real science than the student sitting next to him, dutifully taking notes, right?

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Succinct, focused on essentials

There are a lot of books stuffed with eye candy, boxed topics allegedly demonstrating relevance to things supposedly interesting to students, and so on--everything except the main things. This book focuses rigorously on being economical, vivid, and accurate. You'd think that last item would go without saying, but many other introductory textbooks are filled with slightly-off nuances that make me, as a physicist, cringe. Everything in this book makes me say, "I must say it that way myself from now on."

Particularly noteworthy in a book at this level is the clear treatment of fluid statics and of heat flow. More traditional topics, but exceptionally well presented, include
* Rigid-body motion, deferring three dimensional situations until all concepts have been thoroughly understood in two dimensions.
* Special relativity, particularly the carefully reasoned leadup 12.1--12.3. When the bizarre postulates arrive in 12.4, they are not coming at the reader from left field.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This course book is based on the author's Open Yale Course Physics lectures. The way topics are approached helps in their understanding with all the relevant maths. Some chapters are used as the refresher maths before taking up the subject. I especially liked the professor's approach to explain complexities and consequences of the special relativity theory.

[L'éléphant Et · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very stimulating textbook for self-study, for people with some knowledge of calculus. You would probably need to supplement it with more exercices. The last chapter on each topic is generally slightly more demanding than the average first year physics textbook.

[Chris Duval · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good overall...

The content's pacing is generally even and appropriate, though in spots (like the penultimate section in the last chapter) it seems more condensed.

On production, it would be more helpful if supporting diagrams and parts of the series of equations were replicated when they cross a page leaf (cf. diagrams in the Green Lion Press edition of the Heath translation of Euclid's Elements) so the reader doesn't have to flip back and forth. Also when an equation is repeated later on it would be nicer if, rather than giving it a new number, it used the number from the equation's first instance, which is likely to be the one where it is developed. And it would be nicer if there were many marginal references to the equations going into the argument (using the identifying numbers of their original instances), though of course the informality of some of the argument sets some pragmatic limits to this suggestion.

Like all technical books there are printing errors in the symbols (equations and so forth). The author has an easily searched for PDF list of errata, at least for two of the editions.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book on the whole. Well worth the money.

Main dislikes. I found the end of some chapters just gave a cursory section about something impressive sounding but it was annoying to read because, as the author even says, there isn't the space there to deal with it. This meant that, unlike the vast majority of the book, some parts weren't well explained. I think it was the latter parts of relativity and middle parts of the whole thermodynamics section that just didn't feel amazing like the rest of the book.

Main likes. Well organised. Very well explained in most of the book with the author sometimes giving a few explanations when he felt something was difficult or re-explaining something later if it returned. I didn't mind this because I'd rather read more words I do understand than less words I don't.

[Mayur Sinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Physics will always be my first love and Shankar's simplicity in explaining things makes it more lovable. This book plus the lectures make a deadly combo in satisfying your hunger for basic Physics.

[Mynk Pe · Rating 5 out of 5]

shankar is very good at explaining, his examples are always interesting and on point.

[sbs transit · Rating 4 out of 5]

#nsreads 26

Makes odd leaps at times, but otherwise a decent introduction. I can't believe I keep forgetting things

[Salvador Достоевский · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shankar goes deep in every subject he teaches. Whenever he can he will make you learn physics form 1st principles, like you were in the shoes of Newton or Galileo.
I recommend his Yale lectures accompanied by these books for every student that is very curious and were left a bit unfulfilled by books like that of Serway or Resnick for the lack of depth (these can be well supplemented by Shankar's).
On top of that, the humor is very good and makes his lectures an absolute joy to watch.

[Shauntelle James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers very detailed explanations on common physics issues. It also makes reference to such popular industrial topics like candy production, bartending practice, and weather forecasting. Even though this book has poor repetition, it can be easily understood by anyone with calculus background. I found elliptical orbiting to be the most inspiring topic. Other references include sound and wavelength, photons and light, time and measurement standards, fluid mechanics, and hot versus cold systems.

[Rob Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on the topic of Physics, although I didn't find the intended humor insertions all that humorous. But I didn't let it distract me from the ease of reading. It's very well written, concise and doesn't get too heavy-handed when discussing topics of rotational dynamics, simple harmonic motion, theory of relativity, etc.. The information can be absorbed well and won't feel intimidating to the most pedestrian of physics enthusiasts.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great complement to Dr Shankar's Yale course. His course is great. He is a terrific lecturer and has a real talent for explaining complex topics. He does a great job explaining the mathematical derivation of laws as well as the practical implications for problem solving. He writes in the same conversational style as in his lectures. I strongly recommend both the book ant the lectures (they are on line and free)

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

ver good