I'm suddenly very interested again in how the micro and macro are connected by laws of nature. I find the history of physics, as well as the characters, and insights fascinating. I could talk about it all day. I lost this passion for a few years but it's reemerging again.
David Griffiths is an excellent author if you're not afraid of math.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/1107179866/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-3&keywords=david+griffiths" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-...</a><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4e-David-Griffiths/dp/9332550441/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-4&keywords=david+griffiths" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4e-David...</a><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-David-Griffiths/dp/3527406018/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500826123&sr=8-1&keywords=david+griffiths" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Elementary-Particles-Dav...</a>
<a href="http://theoreticalminimum.com/" rel="nofollow">http://theoreticalminimum.com/</a><p>Lectures by Susskind for people who know (or have forgotten) some calculus and always wanted to know more about physics.
Physicsforums iS A pretty fantastic place to go, if you have a specific question or if you just want to read all of the answers to questions from people who actually know what they're talking about. It also has the benefit of very strong moderation, so it's not the Reddit experience .
> as well as the characters<p>While I cannot recommend any books on physics itself, I can recommend a couple light reads on Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist (links below). Each is structured as a series of short autobiographical stories so they're very easy reads that shed light on some of Feynman's life, both within and without academia.<p>[1] Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)<p><a href="http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/2gTVXa5</a><p>[2] "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character<p><a href="http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/2gTWfOd</a>
special relativity: <a href="http://onestick.com/relativity" rel="nofollow">http://onestick.com/relativity</a><p>general relativity: <a href="http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html</a><p>quantum electrodynamics: "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" or <a href="http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8" rel="nofollow">http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8</a><p>standard model: <a href="http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diagams" rel="nofollow">http://quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diaga...</a><p>conceptual core of quantum mechanics: <a href="http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html" rel="nofollow">http://scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html</a><p>history of quantum mechanics: "The Second Creation" and "The Infinity Puzzle"
Related question: why is there so little documentary content on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann</a> considering his significance and how recently in history he lived??<p>Can anyone recommend any documentaries or videos?
A classic documentary is "Einstein's Universe", where a layman (Peter Ustinov, iirc) is introduced to Relativity.<p>"Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve."<p>It doesn't cover Quantum Mechanics that I recall.
I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.<p>CULTURAL<p>Einstein - Essays in Humanism<p>Frayn - Copenhagen<p>Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!<p>Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?<p>de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole<p>Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers<p>Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart<p>Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics<p>Macaulay - The Way Things Work<p>Paulos - Innumeracy<p>Sagan - Cosmos<p>Sagan - Broca's Brain<p>Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World<p>Salam - Science in the Third World<p>Seife - Zero<p>Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight<p>POPULAR<p>Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)<p>Feynman - The Meaning of It All<p>Feynman - Lectures on Physics<p>Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics<p>Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps<p>Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity<p>Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field<p>Hawking - A Brief History of Time<p>Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach<p>Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science<p>Polya - How to Solve It<p>Schrödinger - What is Life?<p>Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum<p>Susskind - Quantum Mechanics<p>Wallace - Everything And More<p>Weinberg - The First Three Minutes<p>Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.<p>TEXTS<p>Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=PCRKMZ9sg_&dq=evan+berkowitz+democritus+aaronson&pg=PR31&hl=en#v=onepage&q=evan%20berkowitz%20democritus%20aaronson&f=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=...</a> )<p>Abelson and Sussman - SICP<p>Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics<p>Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)<p>Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics<p>Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation<p>Feynman - Feynman's Thesis<p>Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals<p>Fermi - Thermodynamics<p>Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice<p>Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)<p>Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics<p>Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics<p>Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)<p>Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics<p>Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series<p>Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information<p>Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization<p>Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory<p>Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism<p>Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology<p>Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)<p>Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics<p>Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation<p>Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps<p>Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems<p>Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III<p>Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell
I help out on Physics Stack Exchange and the Freenode ##physics channel can still be nicely active sometimes, though not as active as ##math is.<p>If you want that sort of story, one textbook that you might incredibly like would be Griffiths' <i>Introduction to Elementary Particles</i>, which has a very readable first section going into the history of how we came to have the Standard Model that we have today, some names of who discovered what, etc.<p>A. Zee's <i>Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell</i> is also very nice for getting a sort of pleasant appreciation for quantum field theory if you've got some mathematical background.<p>It also depends on what you take for granted as a baseline. If you can find Feynman's New Zealand lectures, for example, you will notice that he deliberately avoids introducing explicit complex numbers or explicit integration, and still manages to convey what both of those mathematical formalisms allow the theory to do. (There are also some little gems. Like, if you pay attention to the part where he says something like "I wish I had brought an example of one of these surfaces where we've erased lines of the mirror so that I could show you" -- then you're in the right position to say, "holy crap, I understand the rainbows that I see in the bottom of CDs/DVDs now!" after a second.)<p>Sussman of Lisp fame went on to write The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book.html" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/...</a> .<p>I'd be remiss if I did not mention that the father of String Theory is on a quest to provide everyone with the education needed to appreciate the current theories of physics; see <a href="http://theoreticalminimum.com/" rel="nofollow">http://theoreticalminimum.com/</a> or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA</a> .<p>If you really want cutting-edge sometimes-somewhat-unbelievable stuff, the Perimeter Institute publishes their lectures-for-the-public online; you might for example really like Penrose's idea that maybe someday when all the black holes have evaporated, all of the particles become massless and they no longer experience time so we can just evolve the system to t=infinity after some finite time: so we discover that what we get as our boundary at infinity could be conformally rescaled to something resembling a t=0 Big Bang -- a "conformal cyclic cosmology". See <a href="http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose" rel="nofollow">http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose</a> for more of that sort of stuff.