The physics books that shaped Krishna

54:26>> All right, so that was the mathematics. Now let's get into the physics. Um the first physics textbook I'd like to talk about is again, the Bible. This is Landau Lifshitz Mechanics. A lot of the viewers and a lot of the grad students in the audience will know this book by a different cover. Okay? They're going to know the the newer version with like there's like circles and like yellow circles everywhere. This is the original um version that my dad actually gave me. Um and it's one that he wants back. Dad, you're not going to get this [clears throat] back. >> [laughter] >> Okay? This This was a formative experience because this was classical mechanics um my second year, first semester. Um this is a crazy textbook.

55:08This is by Lev Landau who's legendary Russian physicist. In the first two pages, he proves that mass cannot be negative. Okay? In the first two pages. And I remember reading this going, "This is insane." That like that like we just take for granted as an axiom the um axiom of least action. That like everything goes by least action. You have like a Lagrangian and stuff like that. And from that you can prove that mass is negative. And then a lot of the problems in here are just like insanely hard. And he has problems and solutions. There's a There's a colloquial saying about Landau Lifshitz, which is

55:50not a not a thought of Lifshitz, not a word from Landau. Because Landau was kind of narrating, and Lifshitz is the guy who typed. >> This sounds like the show. >> Yeah. >> [clears throat] [laughter] >> You're the guy narrating, and I'm the guy who types. >> But this this absolutely an amazing textbook formative for classical mechanics. And it's a textbook that that I definitely used. >> This also reminds me of all the Rugrats fans out there, Dr. Lipschitz. One of the doctor in Rugrats. Slightly different pronunciation, equally impactful. >> [laughter] >> Definitely. >> Next one on our list of textbooks. We've alluded to this before,

56:32Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi. This is one of those where he treats you like a human being. He treats you like a human being. Enrico Fermi, Thermodynamics. This is a great textbook for intro thermodynamics. You don't want to get into like statistical mechanics and the theory of atoms and things like that. You just want to talk about heat, temperature, entropy. This is an amazing amazing read. Really short, you can tell. But just really informative. PV [clears throat] = nRT, equations of state of gases. Absolutely amazing. >> And also on our ranking in our Oppenheimer scientist ranking episode, which you've if you've have not watched,

57:14is a a fantastic deep dive in the concentration of brilliance and genius that was applied to unfortunately the nuclear program. >> Yeah, but and I think Enrico Fermi was top five. >> Yes. >> In that, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Totally deserved. >> Totally deserved. >> Okay, next one. So I So I gave you the first textbook on classical mechanics, which was Landau Lifshitz. >> Yes. >> This next one is the bane of my existence. Goldstein, classical mechanics. Look at how thick this is. And then And then it's just It's just It's just the worst. It's just the absolute worst. It's so dense and it covers literally everything that has to do with classical mechanics, but the

57:54problems are insane. Like no reasonable person would um assign more than two in a homework problem. And guess how many we got? A lot more than two. Okay. So, Goldstein >> Um, you know, a lot of trauma with this textbook, but I get I I do know classical mechanics really well now because of this, right? Um, and this is a really good precursor to learning quantum mechanics because this goes over kind of the subtleties. Like it goes over Poisson brackets really well, which is something that becomes commutators in quantum mechanics. So, it's like it's like a kind of really nice bridge between

58:36classical and quantum mechanics. It's still a terrible textbook, I have to say. >> [laughter] >> It doesn't explain stuff, but the problems are pretty pretty insane. >> If you want some light summer reading as you get ready for year two of FFP, pick up the second edition >> Yeah. >> classical mechanics. >> All right, here's another bane of my existence. >> Okay. >> Jackson classical electrodynamics. I think every physicist would agree that this is the bane of their existence. Okay? Most physicists learn electrodynamics first using the Griffiths textbook. It's a great textbook. I don't have it here. Um, but that's that's the one that I first

59:17learned electromagnetism with. This is the second version of that, where it's like, "Okay, now Now, talk about the real stuff." This is where um like if you want to know how antennas work, this is it. If you want to know how light propagates through random medium, even if the medium is not homogeneous, it's like really weird medium, this is where it happens. Um what what's kind of cool about this is there are problems in this textbook that, you know, require a lot of lot of thought, but they're also things that now I encounter in my research and in my job. Like I work at a quantum computing company where we're doing spin qubits, right? And um part of

59:58a confining individual electrons to create spin qubits is to create a kind of egg carton-like landscape of potentials where it's like positive 5 volts, negative 5 volts, and so on and so forth. That geometry is a homework problem in Jackson. Why he would think that's a reasonable homework problem, I'm not sure. Okay? He he was a maniac. But Jackson is uh another one of these trauma-inducing physics textbooks that, you know, now given the years passed that I look back on, I'm like, "Okay, this is pretty legit." >> Uh two notes on this one. Uh if we go

1:00:39back to our episode where we covered the IceCube Neutrino Detector, we talked about how light moves through ice. >> Yeah, that's in there. >> Uh which was a very viral and popular clip that we had. >> Yeah, Cherenkov radiation. The fact that if a charged particle moves faster than light in a medium, it's going to create a shock wave. Yep, that's in there. Literally everything that you could ever want from an electrodynamics textbook about any electrical phenomenon is in here. >> And for all of my UAP fans, one of the things people talk about is that how these UAP allegedly move around is a part of extended electrodynamics. >> Yeah. >> And so you have to start here first.

1:01:20>> Yeah, you got you got to do the homework problems >> before you get there. >> Yep. This is one of my favorite textbooks, Thermal Physics. This was my introduction to my favorite subject in physics, which is statistical mechanics. Um I I took thermodynamics with Enrico Fermi, but that was um in my first year. It was part of the intro physics curriculum. Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi is very gentle. This one is also actually very gentle, Kittel and Kroemer Thermal Physics. Um in the first chapter or maybe the second chapter, he proves the second law of thermodynamics using two-state systems, like a magnetic spin system. And [snorts] that's a proof that I still have

1:02:02internalized and memorized, and it was a very deep thing for me to realize that the second law of thermodynamics is like something you can just like realize from math and combinatorics. This goes into all the way from phase transitions, like the um Stefan-Boltzmann law that we talked about in the last episode, the T to the fourth dependence, >> Mhm. >> um ideal gas law, how you can get the ideal gas law from just talking about quantum particles. Um it's an amazing textbook as the first textbook for deep statistical mechanics. I would highly recommend. It's honestly one of my favorite physics textbooks of all time. Yep. And finally,

1:02:44we've dealt with classical mechanics, >> Yes. >> electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. The last of the four pillars of modern physics is quantum mechanics. >> Mhm. >> Here we have Sakurai and Napolitano. This is in line sort of similar to Landau-Lifshitz in that Sakurai is the brains behind the textbook. Napolitano is the editor. >> Mhm. >> Modern Quantum Mechanics, this is an amazing textbook for the first half because the first half was written by Sakurai during his lifetime. The second half um Napolitano and a bunch of his colleagues took over and you can see the

1:03:24you can see the decrease in quality. It's still very good, but JJ Sakurai's way of introducing quantum mechanics first using the Stern-Gerlach experiment where the first the first lesson in this book is just about why you need imaginary numbers to describe quantum mechanics. It's it's a very simple description of an experiment and he says the only way that you can describe this experiment is if the internal dynamics involve complex numbers, if they involve the imaginary unit I. It's it's absolutely amazing and then he goes into the Heisenberg picture, the Schrodinger picture, he builds angular momentum,

1:04:05the theory of everything that you know, we know and love in quantum mechanics. Absolutely phenomenal phenomenal textbook. This is what I used in my graduate studies. The in undergrad I used Griffiths, but in graduate studies you use Sakurai and every physics every physics nerd knows JJ Sakurai modern quantum mechanics. >> I'll just make a note for those who may be new. We've covered so many of the concepts that you just talked about on several of our previous podcasts in a variety of frontier research that we build from first principles the history

1:04:47of the understanding that enabled those frontier projects and it's one of the topics that I personally find super fascinating and clearly the audience does as well because so many people react in a positive way anytime we do those discussions. It looks like we have two final >> Yes. >> textbooks left for our first section of the library. >> This one is experiments in modern physics. There was a course at Princeton University, um again, a great course at Princeton University called experiments in modern physics. It was training you in how to do experiments, how to figure out what the noise level is, how to figure out what

1:05:28your error bars is, and um what they would have you do is basically spend 2 weeks doing specific experiments that are legendary. So, for example, you could do the Cavendish experiment that um measured big G. Um the way back in like I think the 1800s. I think maybe late 1700s. Um you can do the Millikan oil drop experiment where you measure the charge of a single electron. You can do the Lamb shift experiment, which is what we see on the cover over here. Um you the one of the ones that I did was measuring the 21-cm line, the 1420 Hz in the galaxy and charting the gas in

1:06:10the galaxy and showing that the galaxy is rotating, calculating how fast the galaxy is rotating by taking a little dish and pointing it at different spots in the galaxy and measuring the Doppler shift. So, a lot of these seminal experiments are described in great, great detail in this book. It's absolutely phenomenal for someone who is interested in experimental physics and especially interested in like the history of how way back when they were still able to get their error bars so small. Michelson-Morley, another one that is um described in this in this book. It's It's a great book. And I will yet again

1:06:51note that if you are a long-time listener of this podcast and you just heard that description of what you get in experiments in modern physics, you'll notice an overlap with the topics that we cover because every single thing that you just mentioned, Michael. So, morally, the Lamb shift, uh the 1420 hydrogen line. I think I I remember back to there was a story we talked about uh the formation of um it was a Oh, it's escaping me now. But, we talked about a a an astrophysics story where it was the accretion disk uh >> Oh, yeah, yeah. No, the um the galactic rotation. Yeah. And measuring that like, oh, the dark matter. It was dark matter

1:07:31halos. It was It was the fact that like the galactic rotation curve is flat after some time. That's something that Yeah. >> something that is is here. So, as you can see as we continue to build the narrative and the story and the history of who we are, you can see how that bleeds into the content we cover. Now, the last but not the least is the one and only biology book to start the collection. >> is the the one and only biology textbook that's going to be on the shelf. Um this was formative for my interest in biology. Um and you can tell from this podcast I'm very interested in biology from a physics perspective. Um this is