Every couple of
years the Physics bug bites me. I loved
the science as a kid, I wolfed down SF paperbacks – especially Asimov’s – like
they were going outta style, I even majored in it in college (only for four
semesters, about 32 or 36 credits if I recall correctly). I enjoy all aspects of it, from quantum
mechanics to astrophysics, to Einstein’s relativity to nuts-n-bolts stuff like
the Periodic Table, the electromagnetic spectrum, and especially all those
hieroglyphic equations. Only thing that
I don’t particularly dig is the electricity / electronics aspect of it. I can barely hang a picture on a wall and
they wanted me to design and build circuits in Electronics 102. Yeesh.
Well, over the
past few weeks I’ve become re-interested in the field. Reading articles online, skimming library
shelves, stuff like that. Borrowed
Asimov’s
Atom, read it in six days,
currently reading through his three-volume
Understanding
Physics tome. Good times.
This past
weekend I felt prodded to go through the books in the basement near the writing
desk. I have six large boxes of books,
grouped roughly by subject, and ruffled through the “science” box. Turns out I have 28 books on physics. Light, almost fluffy stuff written for those
who need a fainting couch when they see a plus sign, to dense, meaty treatises
such as one written by Einstein himself.
Most fall in the middle. Here’s a
list, more for myself than you I suppose, of what I found and what I plan on
re-reading and studying over the next few months:
My Physics 101
textbook
My Introduction
to Modern Physics textbook
Basic Physics: A Self-Teaching Guide by Karl Kuhn
Relativity by Einstein
A 1940s textbook
on Relativity Theory
Newton’s Principia
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
Beyond Einstein by Michio Kaku
The First Three Minutes and Dreams
of a Final Theory by Stephen Weinberg
The Dreaming Universe by Fred Alan Wolf
The Tao of Physics and The
Dancing Wu Li Masters by Fritjof Capra
The Story of Physics by Lloyd Motz
In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat and In
Search of Superstrings by John Gribben
Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose
How to Build a Time Machine and Are
We Alone? by Paul Davies
Black Holes by Clifford Pickover
Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson (a biography)
Einstein’s Universe by Nigel Calder
Superstrings and the Search for the
Theory of Everything by
F. Peat
The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss
and, of course,
So I’m thinking
if I can get through all these in six months, I’ll either be sick to death of
physics or ready to do the Big Man on Campus thing at my local community
college ...
