The Theoretical Minimum

Resumen del libro

In a step beyond "popular science," a string theorist and a citizen scientist teach the amateur what it really takes to hack physics.

In The Theoretical Minimum, physicist Leonard Susskind and hacker-scientist George Hrabovsky offer a first course and associated math for the ardent amateur. Popular physics books give readers a taste of what physicists know, but shy away from teaching the skills required to do the work. By contrast, Susskind and Hrabovsky cover the minimum--the theoretical minimum of the title--that readers need to study more advanced topics. Beginning with classical mechanics, the work ends with discussions of electromagnetic fields and chaos theory. An alternative to the go-to-college method, The Theoretical Minimum offers a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

Contributors
Leonard Susskind has been the Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University since 1978. The author of The Cosmic Landscape and The Black Hole War, he is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes including the science writing prize of the American Institute of Physics for his Scientific American article on black holes. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

George Hrabovsky is a hacker-physicist in Wisconsin involved in as citizen science, or the community of individuals who do science at home. Since May 1999 he has been the president of Madison Area Science and Technology (MAST), a nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific and technological research and education. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.