Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:
- A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.
- At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
- If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions.
David Jeffrey Griffiths is an American physicist and educator. He was on the faculty of Reed College from 1978 through 2009, becoming the Howard Vollum Professor of Science before his retirement. He wrote three highly regarded textbooks for undergraduate physics students.
John Robert Taylor is British-born emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Wolfgang Rindler was an Austrian physicist working in the field of general relativity where he is known for introducing the term "event horizon", Rindler coordinates, and for the use of spinors in general relativity. An honorary member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, he was also a prolific textbook author.
Nathaniel David Mermin is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Hohenberg–Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term "boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on solid-state physics, and for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information science.
Classical Mechanics is a textbook written by Herbert Goldstein, a professor at Columbia University. Intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, it has been one of the standard references on its subject around the world since its first publication in 1950.
The Quantum Vacuum: An Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics is a physics textbook authored by Peter W. Milonni in 1993. The book provides a careful and thorough treatment of zero-point energy, spontaneous emission, the Casimir, van der Waals forces, Lamb shift and anomalous magnetic moment of the electron at a level of detail not found in other introductory texts to quantum electrodynamics.
Classical Electrodynamics is a textbook written by theoretical particle and nuclear physicist John David Jackson. The book originated as lecture notes that Jackson prepared for teaching graduate-level electromagnetism first at McGill University and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Intended for graduate students, and often known as Jackson for short, it has been a standard reference on its subject since its first publication in 1962.
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information is a textbook about quantum information science written by Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang, regarded as a standard text on the subject. It is informally known as "Mike and Ike", after the candies of that name. The book assumes minimal prior experience with quantum mechanics and with computer science, aiming instead to be a self-contained introduction to the relevant features of both. The focus of the text is on theory, rather than the experimental implementations of quantum computers, which are discussed more briefly.
Introduction to Electrodynamics is a textbook by physicist David J. Griffiths. Generally regarded as a standard undergraduate text on the subject, it began as lecture notes that have been perfected over time. Its most recent edition, the fifth, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University. This book uses SI units exclusively. A table for converting between SI and Gaussian units is given in Appendix C.
Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics is a textbook written by Herbert Callen that explains the basics of classical thermodynamics and discusses advanced topics in both classical and quantum frameworks. It covers the subject in an abstract and rigorous manner and contains discussions of applications. The textbook contains three parts, each building upon the previous. The first edition was published in 1960 and a second followed in 1985.
Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods is a 1993 quantum physics textbook by Israeli physicist Asher Peres. Well-regarded among the physics community, it is known for unconventional choices of topics to include.
Electricity and Magnetism is a standard textbook in electromagnetism originally written by Nobel laureate Edward Mills Purcell in 1963. Along with David Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics, this book is one of the most widely adopted undergraduate textbooks in electromagnetism. A Sputnik-era project funded by the National Science Foundation grant, the book is influential for its use of relativity in the presentation of the subject at the undergraduate level. In 1999, it was noted by Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. that the book was widely adopted and has many foreign translations.
Introduction to Solid State Physics, known colloquially as Kittel, is a classic condensed matter physics textbook written by American physicist Charles Kittel in 1953. The book has been highly influential and has seen widespread adoption; Marvin L. Cohen remarked in 2019 that Kittel's content choices in the original edition played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics. It was also the first proper textbook covering this new field of physics. The book is published by John Wiley and Sons and, as of 2018, it is in its ninth edition and has been reprinted many times as well as translated into over a dozen languages, including Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. In some later editions, the eighteenth chapter, titled Nanostructures, was written by Paul McEuen. Along with its competitor Ashcroft and Mermin, the book is considered a standard textbook in condensed matter physics.
Modern Quantum Mechanics, often called Sakurai or Sakurai and Napolitano, is a standard graduate-level quantum mechanics textbook written originally by J. J. Sakurai and edited by San Fu Tuan in 1985, with later editions coauthored by Jim Napolitano. Sakurai died in 1982 before he could finish the textbook and both the first edition of the book, published in 1985 by Benjamin Cummings, and the revised edition of 1994, published by Addison-Wesley, were edited and completed by Tuan posthumously. The book was updated by Napolitano and released two later editions. The second edition was initially published by Addison-Wesley in 2010 and rereleased as an eBook by Cambridge University Press, who released a third edition in 2020.
In physics, Mermin's device or Mermin's machine is a thought experiment intended to illustrate the non-classical features of nature without making a direct reference to quantum mechanics. The challenge is to reproduce the results of the thought experiment in terms of classical physics. The input of the experiment are particles, starting from a common origin, that reach detectors of a device that are independent from each other, the output are the lights of the device that turn on following a specific set of statistics depending on the configuration of the device.
Quantum Mechanics, often called the Cohen-Tannoudji, is a series of standard ungraduate-level quantum mechanics textbook written originally in French by Nobel laureate in Physics Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë; in 1973. The first edition was published by Collection Enseignement des Sciences in Paris, and was translated to English by Wiley.
