(Note: Some parts of this page are still under construction)
Educators usually do not have time to look for the best textbooks for their courses. There are very good reasons for this:
- The belief that the textbooks they are using are the best ones because they have been tested over years
- With so many academic responsibilities (teaching, research, services,...etc.) they end up using the same textbook year after year after year, which is most probably the same textbook they used as graduate students. Ironically enough, some publishers have noticed that and made selling arrangements to benefits from this situation.
- Following the same textbook when teaching the same course a few times helps the instructor to reach an optimized version of the course to maximize students gain and to use the instructor's time more efficiently. Changing the textbook means restarting this process allover again.
Two drawbacks:
- Existence of (growing) gap between what the students learn in the standard curriculum and the applications of that knowledge.
- The standard textbooks are lacking important topics which are currently important for modern understanding of new topics and modern applications (As concrete examples: dynamical systems and chaos theory which are extremely important in wide range of phenomena, or stochastic theory which is now extremely important for gravitational waves detection)
I collect below the best books, in my opinion, currently in the market which educators need to try over the standard textbooks. This will take huge time and effort to prepare the material from a textbook different from what they are used to. But this is a sacrifice any instructor must make if he/she cares about physics education, the learning of his students, and the advance of the physics knowledge of students in the 21st century.
- Freshman and Sophomore Physics
- Special Relativity: Special Relativity by Morin. An educational master piece. It encapsulates all the misconceptions and questions that arise in any body's mind while learning about special relativity. It materializes all the implicit questions and unease feelings that students have into concrete comments which make sure that the learner does not go astray and make sure he/she are always on the right track. It has a general guiding conceptual maps of how topics in special relativity are connected and what is primary and what is derivative. The conceptual and depth of understanding that can be gained from this book is enormous.
- Mechanics: Classical Mechanics by Taylor
- Electromagnetism: Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths
- Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
- Quantum mechanics: Quantum Mechanics by McIntyre, 2012. This has several advantage over Griffiths's Quantum Mechanics. Pros: 1) The subject is introduced using the finite dimensional Hilbert space which is a clean approach in the sense that the difference between classical and quantum mechanics can be discussed from the beginning (which is the same approach by Feynman in his Vol III lectures), 2) It makes a natural connection with graduate level quantum mechanics. Cons: It does not include variational methods, WKB, or scattering theory. These topics need to be supplemented.
- Cosmology: Introduction to Cosmology by Ryden, 2016
- Astrophysics: Astrophysics in a Nutshell by Maoz, 2016
- General Relativity: Modern General Relativity: Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and Cosmology by Guidry, 2019
- Mathematical Physics: Mathematics for Physicists by Altland and Delft, 2019. An educational master piece. Books like this do not come often. "I wish I had this book when I started learning the subject" is a natural thought one gets when reading through the book. Do your students a favor and use this book in your Mathematical Physics course.
- Classical Mechanics:
- Electrodynamics: Modern Electrodynamics by Zangwill, 2012 Many people consider this to be the modern version of Jackson
- Quantum Mechanics: Quantum Mechanics by Banks, 2018 Finally a textbook that organizes the subject in a modern way.
- Statistical Mechanics
- Building a working knowledge: Modern Classical Physics (MCP) by Thorne and Blandford, 2017. This book, and its ancestor (Gravitation), are classic examples of how important reading the preface of the book is, and how easy it is to misunderstand the educational benefit of a book by skipping reading the preface!. Please before judging any book or any author, read the preface of the book first.
If there is one single book that you can follow to start learning about technical writing, it is Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English by Hilary Glasman-Deal