Lagrangian Mechanics For The Non-Physicist (The Modern Physics Series)

Great book, everything is clearly explained, includes step by step equation manipulation so you can follow along, gives very good examples, draws appropriate parallels so you can call upon previous knowledge you might have. The only suggestion would be to have numbered each equation to help with following the derivations (but I guess the lack of numbered equations forced me to really understand/follow each step). Overall great book for both variational calculus & Lagrangian mechanics. Thanks Ville! ChrisI should add, there are minor typos in the formulas in a few places but the Appendix Longer Calculations seems to have it all correct. Ie: pg 211 vs pg 382

Theoretical physicist here - this book is a great journey through the world of Lagrangian Mechanics. The themes are good, the examples are interesting, and most importantly, it's all basically correct. It lacks some rigor, but I don't think the author is going for that. There certainly is an aspect of Lagrangian Mechanics that should be focused on awe and wonder, and this books picks out that thread extremely well.I have to say that - despite the title - I don't know who the audience is. If you are not a physicist, it doesn't seem to me that you'd have the background to follow the book. You at least need several semesters of calculus, and a differential equation course would be helpful too. So who are the non-physicists this book is targeting? I can see an interested undergraduate, or working graduate student, using this book as a study guide *for sure*, but again - not in fields other then physics.Still, I don't want to take away from the quality of the book as a text - it reads the way my colleagues and I talk about Lagrangian Mechanics, which is a great thing!

My goal in Graduate School was a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, but that was sidetracked by the Vietnam draft. My year was the first they drafted Graduate students. That was not the end of my world, and other doors opened up for me. But that did not stop me from having the nagging itch to at least be able to visualize what I had hoped to learn in a QFT course.Along the way, I purchased numerous books on the subject, but each started assuming I had a conceptual picture of how the pieces fit together. Then, they proceeded to dive into the advance math swimming pool, leaving me on the poolside trying to understand how it all worked. While my studies produced some observations, the visual picture I sought was not happening.Ville's two volumes are the books I have been seeking for over Fifty years. His approach explains the conceptual framework up front and then shows how the mathematics implements that framework. I have lost count of how many times in reading his books, I have had lights going off with the insights that my Graduate courses should have taught me. I now go back and reread chapters in other books that I have struggled with and finally understand what they are telling me.What about Ville's title "...for nonphysicists"? It might seem it is filled with hand-wavy discussions intended for casual readers, and not for those who truly want to understand the subject. But his books are much more. He begins each section with a qualitative description of how the pieces fit together. And if that is sufficient, you can stop there and feel you have accomplished something.But using that framework as a roadmap, he then goes through the mathematical model that implements Lagrangian Mechanics and Field Theory. While you do not need to work through the calculations in detail, you see the equations that are the starting point of many other texts and finally understand their motivation.In short, Ville's efforts have resonated with my picture-oriented approach to Advanced Physics, and enabled me to visually understand what I have always known had to be there. So many Physics instructors start off with the math and never truly explain the framework surrounding the Physics game. In short, you cannot play a sport without understanding the rules within which the game is played. This is what Ville has provided.Ville has achieved his goal of making the foundations of advanced Physics accessible, and I have not seen another set of books that does so as effectively. If that is your goal, it will be money well spent to purchase both volumes.

I am retired EE and felt that this book is written for folks like me who for one reason or another chose a different technical path in their career for whatever the reasons are but always had a great admiration for physics as a discipline and wanted to learn more.There are many books out there discussing this subject so what makes this stand out?First it is not a standard text but written to help guide the reader and not to show off what the author knows which is typical of many text books.The physics is explained and questions like why is it important or why should i care about this or that is anticipated by the author thru out the book and answered in a most satisfactory way.I especially like the sections on Lagrangian constrains as most text books are very confusing for this section for the non expert. The author does a great job explaining and laying out the framework.The other area that I think it stands out is the discussion on Noether's Theorem /symmetry and conservation laws.Most books throws this section at the reader in a very dry or terse manner leaving the reader wondering how the theorem ,symmetry and conservation laws all come togetherThe author in this book took great pains to demonstrate it with wonderful examples including how probabilty is conserved in Quantum mechanics. That treatment of this is rarely seen in books .In closing the physics and the following math is all explained in great detail and not left to reader to bridge the gaps.The only feedback to the author is that there is no index at the end of the book so in trying to search for a subject i had to flip back and forth . Also would be great to include a section on Poisson brackets /phase space /Gibbs Liouville theorem to make the text even better. Looking forward to some of the worksheets from the website to further test my understanding on this subject. Now on to the next book on Field Theory from the same author

Expanded coverage of topic for people with some background already. Would get five stars if it had an index.

I had to get this volume due to the great reviews. I now count myself as one who heartily recommends this work. As a quantum gravity enthusiast and former physics major, I found I needed a refresher in these mechanics in order to better understand the many prongs of current theoretical research into gravity. This work really helped boil it all down into a completely understandable body of mathematical practice. Something, I might add, that most of the physics professors at college had a very hard time doing themselves!

Great complement to the first volume in Susskind’s “Theoretical Minimum” series.

This book is excellent: it is clear and answers the main questions that physicists (yes, it is for physicists) would have about Lagrangian Mechanics. I took advanced mechanics both as an undergraduate and graduate student (and now teach introduction mechanics at an R1 university). This book is so much qualitatively clearer than the textbooks that we used when I was a student. Only positive things to say about this book (other than the title ... no one but a physicist would read it). When I teach upper-level mechanics, I will draw heavily from this book. Very nice job all around, particularly connecting to the bigger picture in physics more generally. I plan on purchasing the follow-on book about field theory.

Una introducción fácilmente entendible al tema, con introducción a la cinemática, mecánica Newtoniana y demás. Según pone en la portada es para no físicos, lo que quiere decir que es para matemáticos, químicos, ingenieros y estudiantes y profesionales de otras áreas en las que se estudian concepto matemáticos relativamente avanzados, hasta ecuaciones diferenciales bastante sencillas.

I like the informal style, yet still a complete and solid coverage of the subject, including variational calculus, the Euler-Lagrange equations, applications in classical mechanics and Noether's theorems.

What's so good about this book is the writer is with you as you read through it explaining everything as you go along chapter by chapter good book

Lagrangian Mechanics ReviewA few years ago, partly out of curiosity and partly for philosophical questions, I started studying physics on my own. I thought that my two master's degrees in electronic engineering and philosophy of science would be enough for a nice and easy journey into the field of modern pure physics. I soon discovered that there were many completely new names and concepts for me and understanding them required a lot of effort. One of my mistakes was that I started this journey with Quantum Mechanics and then with Relativity instead of first reading Mechanics, which I took for granted. Do not make that mistake. The Lagrangian on which almost all theories of physics are based will be well understood in mechanics, and not in the other theories.Since there was no one around to ask, I started as a good (naive in my case) student by buying books, piling them up one on top of the other. The result was not what I expected. I was certainly enriching my mathematical skills (the trees), but I was missing the forest (what we mean by modern physics and why). I discovered that many books titled "introductory" or "user-friendly" or "easy to understand" and the like are excellent, but not introductory. Α proof of this is that many of them are mentioned as further reading by many authors of other "easy" books. It is a mess.A truly introductory book should respect three rules:1) A minimum of rigorous mathematics, otherwise the student risks getting lost in proofs and lengthy calculations instead of assimilating the concepts of the field presented to him.2) A careful selection of the concepts to be given to a beginner. It is far better to omit a concept than to present everything at once.3) And the third rule that is most difficult for a writer to respect is to try to remember what was unclear for him and his classmates when they were undergraduates, what they were missing, why this was happening, and how a writer or a teacher should adapt his material to address it, to resolve it.And here's the big surprise. A good book. A very good one. A valuable book.I give it all these names as a kind of revenge for the time I wasted, the frustration I felt, the confusion I felt trying to understand the others named as “introductory books”Ville Hirvonen had respected the above rules and had made a strategic choice, namely to build mechanics based on the Lagrangian.What is the Lagrangian, what are the problems we solve in contrast to Newtonian physics. How conserved quantities are related to symmetries, why every symmetry gives rise to a conserved quantity, an invariant.All these concepts are mentioned in other books, but only he, as far as I know, understands what it means to be a beginner, what the needs of a beginner are. He explains and builds, explains and leads us from the easy to the difficult without effort, without embarrassment, without leaving gaps and holes in his explanations. He knows very well how to keep mathematics to a minimum. This is not an easy task. Most authors oversimplify or overload mathematics. We must never forget that we are dealing with physics, not mathematics. I strongly disagree with the idea that if we don't know much mathematics, we cannot deal with physics. Mathematicians invent theories, that is their job, and physicists apply them, whenever they are needed, even decades after they were invented, and with the help of a mathematician friend, if necessary. What better example than Einstein?Ville Hirvonen does all of this. He reduces mathematics to a minimum, without losing its rigor, and helps us to understand and develop our intuition.In addition, he does something else, which is very important because it gives us the confidence that we can go further. In the last pages he shows briefly but essentially how Lagrangian mechanics extends to field theories and how time derivatives become field derivatives. With these extensions in hand, he goes further by showing the Schrödinger Lagrangian, the U(1) Symmetry of Schrödinger field theory, and the Conservation of Probability. But don't worry, you won't miss anything about Lagrangian Mechanics if you don't read these last few pages.Last but not least, I would be doing the author an injustice if I didn't emphasize the following points:There are many applicable examples for each concept, well-chosen and well explained.And there are appendices on coordinates and coordinate systems in physics and appendices with more extensive calculations and derivatives on topics included in the main parts of the book.I wish you a good read.P.S.Teaching in academia is not valued as much as it should be for an academic career, but is seen as an auxiliary element of research. However, there are talented people who are born to be teachers or writers or both of them and it is not fair that they do not enjoy the same distinctions as good researchers.At the University where I graduated, one of the most prestigious Italian universities, only two out of about 80 lecturers in electronic engineering were inspired teachers and of course all of us students, even university lecturers in other disciplines, were squeezed like grapes in the classrooms where they taught. There was always so much silence that you could hear a pin drop. Good teachers always make students good professionals.

Thank you Ville. This book is exactly what I have been wanting for years. It’s the perfect fit between my Electrical Engineering background and my interest to learn modern physics more formally. I really enjoyed the smooth and easy delivery of the details of Lagrangian Mechanics. I also appreciate the supporting articles on the web site. Just now opening your book on Field Theory and looking forward to enjoy that one also.