Re:Learn Physics by Programming in Haskell
by Steuard on Sunday February 25, 2018 @10:49AM
(#16459456)
[I'm a physics professor, for what it's worth, and I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to find a good textbook for this.]
For folks with a programming background, I suspect it would be hard to do better than Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood. (Someone already mentioned this elsewhere in the comments here.) It makes substantial use of Python code in the text and problems, and (partly enabled by that) it takes a delightfully modern approach that discusses the true (relativistic) formula for momentum (etc.) very early on. I haven't taught out of it yet, but I've been very tempted.
I'm currently teaching the intro course using Tom Moore's Six Ideas that Shaped Physics series. His approach is a little quirky at times, but usually for good reasons. I like it a lot.
Those are both purely introductory texts (though both cover topics up through "modern" physics: relativity and basic quantum phenomena). Beyond that, well, that's a bigger question.
For folks with a programming background, I suspect it would be hard to do better than Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood. (Someone already mentioned this elsewhere in the comments here.) It makes substantial use of Python code in the text and problems, and (partly enabled by that) it takes a delightfully modern approach that discusses the true (relativistic) formula for momentum (etc.) very early on. I haven't taught out of it yet, but I've been very tempted.
I'm currently teaching the intro course using Tom Moore's Six Ideas that Shaped Physics series. His approach is a little quirky at times, but usually for good reasons. I like it a lot.
Those are both purely introductory texts (though both cover topics up through "modern" physics: relativity and basic quantum phenomena). Beyond that, well, that's a bigger question.