Vibrations and Waves in Physics: Third Edition

by Iain G. Main

This book is designed as a text for an undergraduate course on vibrations and waves. The overall objectives of the book are to lead the student through the basic physical concepts of vibrations and waves and to demonstrate how these concepts unify a wide variety of familiar physics. This new edition contains an elementary, descriptive introduction to the important ideas of chaos. The author has also taken pains to update the applications. As with previous editions, the book contains numerous problems with hints and numerical solutions.

Genres: Physics, Science

378 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Adam Lantos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great as a supplement to a more "full" textbook. This treats subjects in a way that gives you the proof, then comments on the meaning and in many occasions it also provides with details on some subtle details of the subject. One particularly good example for this is the treatment of the Cut-off frequency in the chapter of Evanescent waves. The reason that I recommend this as a secondary and not as a primary book is because there are other books out there that might include more subjects and treat each one of them with the same detail as the subjects of this book(one example is Smith's Waves and Oscillations) and there are other books that might have more thorough discussions of each subject(like Crawford's excellent Waves book). What make this so good as a supplement to maybe the aforementioned textbooks is that although it analyzes less subjects than the other books, it analyzes them in more detail. So, it emphasizes on the basics which can be found in any waves book it also tackles few subtle points. The "few" is not a bad thing, because the "few" is meant in the following way: the author chose which subtle points to discuss in order to NOT hold the reader by the hand but providing him with unusual insight on carefully chosen points that are rarely discussed in other books but are important and can provide the reader with the means to think by himself the other subtle point that the book might not tackle.

[Philitsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my three favorite college textbooks

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

refreshing my basic understanding of waves... good for thesis and surfing.