Physics Essentials: Modern Mechanics

(If you’ve been here before: See below for May 23rd homework.)

Join us in a guided group study of the most essential subject in physics: mechanics! Unlike your high school or college mechanics course, we're following two deeply insightful textbooks:

• Modern Classical Mechanics, by Helliwell and Sahakian, is our primary text. It offers a fresh take on classical mechanics, treating it as a logically coherent system rather than a bag of tricks. It introduces powerful tools like the Euler-Lagrange equations and Hamiltonian dynamics without assuming a deep math or physics background. The authors focus on the “why” behind the equations, helping readers see the physical ideas and symmetries that unify different problems.
• Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, by V.I. Arnold, emphasizes the deep, geometric language of physics. We use this as a secondary resource. Arnold’s approach connects simple Newtonian mechanics to powerful ideas like manifolds, symplectic structure, and group theory – concepts that also show up in quantum mechanics and modern physics.

The material starts with familiar concepts and carefully develops them into advanced topics. Don't worry if you feel like you don't have enough background for the latter; our group is incredibly friendly and paced to support learners from a variety of backgrounds. We encourage questions, discussions, and a spirit of curiosity. Whether you're revisiting physics or exploring it for the first time, you're welcome here.

What to expect – Here is our current format:

• Before each meeting, we will assign ourselves a reading and a set of exercises that everyone is invited to try for next time. (All of this is optional and there is never anything expected or required – this is a self-study group!)
• During the meeting, one or more volunteers will teach the lessons from the assigned readings, and others will present their solutions to (or attempts at!) the exercises.
• Between meetings, we will collaborate through our chat server and/or small study sessions during "office hours". New members should especially take advantage of these to get up to speed. Ask us for details and links to these fantastic resources!

Prerequisites: So long as you have taken at least some amount of college calculus and physics at some point in your life, you should be fine.
We maintain a live chat server for staying in touch between meetups. Ask us for a link.

This event joins our other existing collaborative study tracks. Please note that this particular meetup series is a highly mathematical meetup for everyone who is serious about learning field theory at a graduate or advanced undergraduate level. It is not a general discussion group for popular physics topics or sci-fi tangents. For casual physics chat, please attend our regular Discuss Physics and Make Friends event, held every third Wednesday of the month.

Having technical trouble joining the meeting? You need to use the Zoom app and log in with a (free to create) personal Zoom account before you can join our meeting. You might not be able to join directly from a web browser if you can’t log in.

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Homework for May 23 meeting:

• Read sections 1.1 - 1.6.
• If you've volunteered to present a section, please prepare your portion to present at the next meeting.
• If you’re joining us for the first time, simply download a Kindle preview of the book and read chapter 1.