Reddit reviews An Introduction to Mechanics

My favourite is Kleppner-Kolenkow.

You're definitely asking the right question. It doesn't explain. To be fair, it's difficult to explain without some math (it's in Kleppner and Kolenkow, if you have a copy available to you).

But I think it is a deficiency in the blog write-up. Presumably the author wants this kind of feedback.

To be completely honest, neither Brian Greene books nor high school math are going to give you a genuine feel of what it's like to study physics at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level. That said, if you're interested, then I absolutely recommend diving in and seeing how far you get. Even if you eventually decide that you don't want to be a physicist, the quantitative and critical thinking skills you'll pick up are desirable in many other lucrative careers (e.g. finance, computing, etc).

As for intro physics texts, I highly recommend An Introduction to Mechanics by Kleppner and Kolenkow. This is about as close as an intro physics book gets to real physics (in terms of style, not content). It's not an easy read, even for students who already have a background in physics...but if you want to study physics, you'll have to get used to that. I'm not sure how much math you've seen, but you'll need to be comfortable with single variable calculus before reading a book like K&K.

If you haven't seen calculus yet, then I recommend focusing on math for now...physics without calculus is rarely more than memorizing equations and crunching numbers. This will definitely give you the wrong idea about what physics is like.

Try looking on the course webpages such as for CS 31 and CS 32. Attempt to do the problems before learning the material for CS 33. This will test your understanding and solidify what you already know. Some of their homework problems are extremely challenging, but in most cases, the homework problems will not change from year to year that much. This means that if you start now, you will be done with the homework by the time you get here. This is awesome because your grade for these classes are all from your homework. The textbooks used for these courses are RHK, K&K, and Feynman.

While you're at it, you might want to start learning linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, vector calculus, and partial differential equations.

Source: I graded homework for CCS Physics.

The books others have suggested here are all great, but if you've never seen physics with calculus before, you may want to begin with something more accessible. Taylor and Goldstein are aimed at advanced undergraduates and spend almost no time on the elementary formulation of Newtonian mechanics. They're designed to teach you about more advanced methods of mechanics, primarily the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations.

Therefore, I suggest you start with a book that's designed to be introductory. I don't have a particular favorite, but you may enjoy Serway & Jewett or Halliday & Resnick.

Many of us learned out of K&K, as it's been something of a standard in honors intro courses since the seventies. (Oh my god, a new edition? Why?!) However, most of its readers these days have already seen physics with calculus once before, and many of them still find it a difficult read. You may want to see if your school's library has a copy so you can try before you buy.

If you do enjoy the level of K&K, then I strongly encourage you to find a copy of Purcell when you get to studying electricity and magnetism. If you are confident with the math, it is far and away the best book for introductory E&M—there's no substitute! (And personally, I'd strongly suggest you get the original or the second edition used. The third edition made the switch to SI units, which are not well-suited to electromagnetic theory.)

By the way: if you don't care what edition you're getting, and you're okay with international editions, you can get these books really cheaply. For instance: Goldstein, S&J, K&K, Purcell.

Finally, if you go looking for other books or asking other people, you should be aware that "analytical mechanics" often means those more advanced methods you learn in a second course on mechanics. If you just say "mechanics with calculus", people will get the idea of what you're looking for.

I would assume that if you're a music major and "been good at math", you might be referring to the math of high school. In any case, it would help if you spend some time doing/reviewing calculus in parallel while you go through some introductory physics book. So here's what you could do:

• math: grab a copy of one of the following (or some similar textbook) and go through the text as well as the problems
  
  • Thomas and Finney
    
  • Stewart (older editions of this are okay since they are cheaper. I have fourth edition which is good enough).
    
• physics:
  
  • for mostly conceptual discussion of physics, Feynman lectures
    
  • for beginner level problems sets in various branches of physics, any one of the following (older editions are okay):
    
    • Halliday and Resnick
      
    • Young and Freedman
      
    • Serway and Jewett
      
    • Giancoli
      
  • for intermediate level discussion (actually you can jump right into this if your calculus is good) on mechanics , the core branch of physics, Kleppner and Kolenkow
    
    
    Other than that, feel free to google your question. You'll find good info on websites like physicsforums.com, physics.stackexchange.com, as well as past threads on this subreddit where others have asked similar questions.
    
    Once you're past the intro (i.e., solid grasp of calculus, and solid grasp of mechanics, which could take up to a year), you are ready to venture further into math and physics territory. In that regard, I recommend you look at posts by Gerard 't Hooft and John Baez.

My undergrad was in pure math. My current focus is on applications of deep learning to computational genomics, but I can feel my lack of practical skills, so here I am...

As far as the study group, I was thinking of modifying the MIT program a slightly. For example, 8.01 is the standard freshman physics course there. It doesn't assume knowledge of vector calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, so it (generally) avoids lifting systems into three dimensions, or deriving equations (of motion) analytically from the diff. eqs. We can swap this course for
8.012, which does not shy away from the math. The course uses "Introduction to Mechanics". Since, I presume, most people who are up for this study group will have some kind of degree in science or engineering, swapping 8.01 for 8.012 (and so forth) may be the way to go. Thoughts?