5 Physics Books You Should Read (Popular Science + Textbook Recommendations)

hey everyone parth here now many of you have been asking me for some physics book recommendations so i thought i'd make a video on that today i'll be discussing five books that i've really enjoyed reading or dipping into and i'll be splitting them into three popular science books that anyone can take a pop-up without necessarily being a physics student and two more technical books that give you a more detailed description of any physics concepts they're trying to explain i'll also leave some affiliate links down in the description below in case you want to get any of these books and if you enjoy this video of course please hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more fun physics content let's get into it okay so as i've mentioned we'll be starting with the three popular science books so basically anyone can have a go at reading them i find these to be quite fun enjoyable easy to read and so on the first of these books is called 50 physics ideas you really need to know by joanne baker and the title is pretty self-explanatory it goes through 50 different ideas in physics some of these ideas are pretty well known and others not so much so it's giving you 50 different ideas to have a little think about i read this book just before i was about to start university because my chemistry teacher in school lent it to me after she found out i wanted to do a physics degree this teacher had been at my school for years and years having taught some of my teachers and i recently found out that she passed away so i knew i had to include this book in my list of five recommendations partly because of the amount of effort my teacher put into getting me a book that she thought i'd find interesting and partly because it's a fun read the book is split up into different areas of physics such as motion of matter waves quantum mechanics cosmology and so on and in my opinion it really does cover some of the more important ideas in physics and it explains them all succinctly you get a couple of pages per idea so definitely do check it out if it sounds like something that would interest you let's move on to my next recommendation now if you've been following my channel for a little while this next book you might have heard of already it's called dead famous albert einstein and his inflatable universe by dr mike goldsmith this is a children's book but i'd recommend anyone read it because this was the very first book that i read that got me interested in physics before reading this book my favorite subject at school was mathematics but by the time i'd read the final page of this book i was totally sold on physics it's basically an albert einstein biography for kids it talks about not just his work in physics but also his life in general but what i really enjoyed about the book was the engaging and simplified way in which he explained some rather difficult physics concepts some of the stuff that einstein worked on in his time it's a really nice stepping stone to properly understanding some of the theories that he worked on once you go into the mathematics but reading this book is a very good introduction to that so that's my second recommendation let's move on to the third one this next book is one that i'm currently in the middle of reading and it's quite fun so far it's called how to teach quantum physics to your dog by chad ozell the concept of this book is quite fun and unusual with the author essentially having conversations with his dog and trying to explain different quantum physics ideas to his dog in ways that she would be interested in such as chasing squirrels and stuff like that but this book also explains why quantum phenomena aren't necessarily easily noticeable at the dog scale and why they are much more noticeable and much smaller scales and after every conversation with this dog there's also a section explaining in detail exactly what's been going on in that conversation as i say i'm still in the middle of reading this book and so far it's proven quite fine with some pretty decent explanations of a few quantum physics ideas and so those are my three popular science book recommendations as i say you absolutely don't need to know any physics in advance in order to be able to read these books but the next two that i'm going to recommend are a bit more technical as i understand it both of these next two books are aimed at undergraduate physics students going into a lot of mathematical detail but i still think they're worth having a go at by following the maths that you do understand the bits that you don't you sort of assume they're true until you know the mats to be able to verify that for yourself because i still think it'll give you a bit more of a deep understanding of what's going on with certain physical phenomena and i reckon especially if you know a bit of calculus you should be able to go some way towards seeing at least why in principle some of the maths make sense and in many cases you'll actually just be able to follow it right away so the first of these books is called quantum theory by david bowm now david bowman was a very influential scientist and this book is basically an overview of quantum theory as it was back then when he was doing his work now this book i've only ever used as a reference book to brush up on some technical details here and there but i find it to be presented in a very nice way as i say it's made for students and so i find the explanations in this book quite satisfying apparently though it was after writing this book that david bohm felt like he was not satisfied with how quantum theory was going at the time and did some of his most famous work on bohmian mechanics and other areas of quantum physics so yeah definitely go check this book out if you want to learn more about the basics of quantum mechanics okay the final book that i'm going to be recommending in this video is perhaps the most math heavy but i'll explain why i'm recommending in a second it's called general relativity an introduction for physicists by hobson estathieu and lazenby and it basically covers the relativity courses that i studied when i was at university i had two of the authors of this book as my lecturers so i used it a fair amount while i was at university again dipping into it in order to figure out links between different topics in the relativity course that we were studying now this book starts out with some of the most important basic concepts in special relativity and it sort of builds from there going into general relativity it goes into a lot of mathematical detail about concepts such as manifolds vector calculus tensors and other bits of differential geometry that you need in order to study general relativity and so it's definitely quite a tough book to have a go out if you're not a physics student it's also very thick it covers a lot of different ideas in relativity and is expensive as well however i do get asked a lot of different questions about ideas in relativity and cosmology and it seems like everybody wants to get a very deep detailed understanding whenever i get asked these questions so if you want to do that this is the book if you want a bit more of a general overview on physics with something that's much more digestible where you don't actually have to sit down and work through every single thing in the book then definitely the first three on the recommendation list are the way to go and so those are my five physics book recommendations at least for this video i'll definitely do another one at some point i do want to know though are there any physics books that you have read that you'd like to recommend to everybody else watching this video leave them in the comments down below i'd like to check out some more physics books as well also i very quickly wanted to mention my merch linked in the description below i'm actually wearing one piece right now it's a quantum dice design that i had a lot of fun creating is based on a quote by albert einstein so if you'd like to support this channel then link to that description below do hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more fun physics content and if you'd like to support me on patreon then there's a link to that down below as well thank you so much for watching as always i really appreciate your support on these videos i will see you very soon [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Parth G

Views: 4,416

Rating: 4.9736843 out of 5

Keywords: physics book, physics book recommendations, physics book class 11, physics textbooks, physics, physics textbooks for university, physics textbooks for high school, popular physics, popular science, parth g, how to study, fun physics, quantum theory, general relativity, 50 physics ideas, dead famous, quantum physics dog, science book, best physics books, physics books, physics books you must have

Id: WDckRoz1biM

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021