Talk:Modern Physics

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I agree that this is a stunning piece of work! However, having found his email (raymond@kestrel.nmt.edu), I am loath to contact him personally. Perhaps we could construct a letter of appreciation and an invitation over here from all of us. Forgive me if I take the liberty of starting the ball rolling - I think it should include:

  • thanks for his work
  • request that we continue to publish it (just for politness sake, I know it's GNU FDL)
  • an invitation to visit Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wikiversity etc. --Mark Lewis 23:55, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This is great! Let's make sure we give this guy proper credit per the GNU FDL and also make him aware of what we are doing. Maveric149

Hey Mav, there are more things like this one here with the GNU FDL license and everything .. I started one up for Cell Bio but there are many more to harvest. Karl Wick

I've done an initial conversion of this page:

Contents

[edit] Beats

Suppose two sound waves of different frequency impinge on your ear at the same time. The displacement perceived by your ear is the superposition of these two waves, with time dependence A(t) = sin(ω1t) + sin(ω2t) = 2sin(ω0t)cos(Δωt), (2.19)

where we now have ω0 = (ω1 + ω2) / 2 and Δω = (ω2 - ω1) / 2. What you actually hear is a tone with angular frequency ω0 which fades in and out with period Tbeat = π / Δω = 2π / (ω2 - ω1) = 1 / (f2 - f1). (2.20)

The beat frequency is simply fbeat = 1 / Tbeat = f2 - f1. (2.21)

Note how beats are the time analog of wave packets -- the mathematics are the same except that frequency replaces wavenumber and time replaces space.

Is this generally acceptable? -- Jimregan 18:41 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why don't you add other sections of your textbook here? I'm more interested in editing the more "fun" section than elementary wave theory/geometric optics.

Why don't you help out and add some other sections yourself. dave 22:50, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Do you realize the presence of a partially ported textbook which no one seems to bother to completely transfer is actually hampering the creation of a textbook? If you'd never thought of porting over a textbook, by now, I'm pretty sure we'd have more material!

Why don't you help out and add some other sections yourself. dave 22:50, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)


Two questions:

  1. If we make changes to this textbook and the original author makes changes, there is no easy way to "merge" them like in CVS for example. How complete is his work? If it is 99% complete physics textbook then that's fine. I guess we could also entice him to work on this "fork" of his textbook once we port it over.
We could try, but anyway I don't think it matters if they diverge.Theresa knott
  1. Should all the graphics be changed to have a white background? The grey looks horrid. dave 22:59, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I agree, or why not make it transparent, that way if we ever change the colour of the page w wonlt have go and change all the graphics. Theresa knott


About TeX/HTML:

Over at www.wikipedia.org, on a few articles I've helped out with, I've been pushing for italic HTML in the text regions, and TeX for indented formulas, so like the following:

So, a great physicist proved that a = b + c except when e < d. Here is the proof of that:

a < b,

so,

e + d + c + a > b

Sorry I was stumped for a good example. Anyways, TeX in the text looks really bad, unless the PNG is made smaller by a future version of wikipedia. dave 23:22, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Great book ! I'll give a hand to porting it here. BTW, has anyone reached the author ? R 19:07, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Aim of text

Popped on over here from Wikipedia and couldn't help but check out the books in my field. My question though is what type of course this is supposed to be a text for.

None, specifically. Textbooks don't have to be tied to courses. This text is based on http://kestrel.nmt.edu/~raymond/classes/ph13xbook/index.html. It should give an introduction to the basic principles and methods of physics, with emphasis on the underlying unity. Carandol

It seems like way too much material for one semester, but each chapter is too little material, too.

That depends quite a bit on the university, and the country - one of the reasons why this text is not being tailored for a specific course. Carandol

Specifically, I'm looking at the Quantum Mechanics. It looks like it's going to be on a level of what is usually (at the schools I've been at) called Quantum Physics, which is a second year undergraduate course. But if it solves the Hydrogen atom (there's a Hydrogen Atom section at least),

The source text doesn't give a full solution. It uses the uncertainty principle to estimate the ground state. Carandol

then it looks like it's trying to be a text for a junior/senior-level Quantum Mechanics course, in which case it needs many more sections on Dirac notation, spin, angular momentum, the harmonic oscillator, path integrals, and maybe time-independent perturbation theory.

I'd put all that into a separate undergraduate comprehensive QM book, which should also include time-dependant perturbations, scattering and quantum thermodynamics, everything short of postgrad. Carandol 05:43, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The latter is the stuff I think is interesting and would be into working on. So yeah, what is this textbook trying to be? -Laura Scudder

I got the same feeling as Laura above. If all the topics mentioned on Modern Physics covered with any reasonable depth, it should actually cover the full 4 year of physics major education (taking UC Berkeley as example, Intro (mere skimming surface, except for mechanics and E&M) to each of those topics would cover the first 3 semesters (7A - C), Quantum mechanics would cover 137A and B, E&M would cover 110A and B, Mechanics would cover 105. Nuclear physics and relativity (special and general) would cover a year (or two courses) of electives. The only thing it's missing is statistical mechanics and a lab course! I think Modern Physics needs to be clear (on the front page somewhere) regarding its aims, esp. whether it actually intends to cover all mentioned topics in depth (essentially forming what is comparable to Landau's course on theoretical physics), or whether it intends to simply give the student a quick taste of each without going into details.

I'm making this request because people seem to be suggesting often that other advanced textbooks be merged into this project, and if this project doesn't intend to cover all these topics in depth (and essentially forming a *complete* physics education for physics majors) ... well, it should be clearly out in the open. novakyu (talk) 11:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks to Flonejek

Flonejek, you are doing a great service in working on this book. It may not be overtly glamorous work at the onset but the result will be very helpful to many people. Thank you. --Karl Wick

Cool, thanks --flonejek 07:49, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

--- The various contents pages have some of the subsections in a different order to the source book.

If we're keeping this as a single coherent course (even if possibly in multiple volumes) many of them will need returning to the original order, to preserve logical dependance.

If we're going to convert the source book into a set of stand-alone books, most of the chapters will need considerably more expansion and some reordering.

I'll do it the first way, unless anyone objects. Carandol ---

[edit] I'm Back :)

Had some tough times at school, but now i'm back, and hope to be making at least one edit/addition a week --flonejek 04:38, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Be nice to have people editing this book. You may notice I've made some changes to some of the chapters, and added some extra material, both to reflect the previous changes in chapter order from the base text and to enhance the presentation of pysics as a subject with a underlying unity, not just a random collection of formulas.
This does mean that half the chapter you just uploaded has already been incorporated into other chapters, and the the rest will need some revision, with 'Event horizons' being folded into it, that being rather a short chapter to stand alone and material that will work best closer to its diagram. :)
Since we're both working on this book, perhaps it'll be best if we both keep an eye on what the other is doing, to make sure the book retains its unity. Carandol 06:17, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Ok, I agree with that, especially the re-orientation away from a formula based text, I had a bit of a struggle understanding most of them myself. For now I'm going to read over whats been written already, and then I'll start adding/editing stuff again, mostly on weekends. I like the changes you made as well, though I might redraw a few of those diagrams in inkscape, at the moment they look a bit straggly. --flonejek 00:11, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Hey, I'd be quite keen to help out on some physics books here. I started by deriving the time-independent Shrôdinger equation and correcting a couple of mistakes in the Operators page. Is that cool or am I being a bit too formula-y? Spitvalve 22:27, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Another source

Another source available is http://www.physicsforfree.com, which has three "copyright free" textbooks. --Laura Scudder | Talk 02:27, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Navigation Template

I'm going to be doing alot of work and contributing to the electromagnetics section of this book, and I've created a handy template that (i think) we should employ throughout this book: {{ModernPhysicsNav}}. This template creates a backlink to the main page if no arguments are provided, and it will provide a link to a section page if an argument is provided. More information about this template, and the way to use it can be found On the template page itself, HERE. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 14:11, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

It would take the same amount of time to rename a page to create automatic backlinks as it would using this template, so I personally don't see it as being needed. What I find to be a lot more useful are links to the next chapter of a book, rather than back to the contents page. See {{Chess/Navigation}} for an example. The format would be {{Modern Physics nav|previous subpage name|next subpage name}} on the bottom of each page. --hagindaz 07:00, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
I see it's already been added. Nevermind then! No need to redo everything. :) --hagindaz 07:05, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I was a little hasty, perhaps. I got very frustrated very quickly by the lack of page navigation in this book. If you go to The Waves Chapter, you can see that people have already provided individual navigation templates for pages in an individual section. I propose that we extend that idea to cover each individual section in this book. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 13:36, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
As per your suggestion, Hagindaz, I'll edit the navigation template to optionally take 2 more parameters: A link to the previous page, and a link to the next page. In this way, we can add this kind of navigation on a per-page basis, if we want to, or let other navigation templates do the job, such as on the Waves section. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 14:23, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
I am in favour of each section of this book being written as a book in its own right. Published modern physics textbooks are usually 2 or more volumes with at least 1000 pages. Perhaps the template could be used in each subsidiary book ie: Quantum physics : Heisenberg uncertainty principle. rather than Modern physics: Quantum Physics: Heisenberg etc. Each template would have a link to the Modern Physics introductory page. RobinH 14:42, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stub Template

I created a specific template for use in marking stubs for this book: {{ModernPhysicsStub}}. This template automatically puts all stub pages of this book into Category:Modern Physics/Stubs, which is a sub-category of Category:Modern Physics. We can use this template and these categories to quickly find all stub pages in this book that require attention. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 17:42, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Combined, here is a list of available templates and category designations that are specifically designed for use with this book:
All of these tools are explained on their respective module and talk pages. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 19:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Contributors

These people were listed as "Contributors" on the front page, but none of them have been active on wikibooks for at least 1 year (and in some cases much more). I have removed the names from the front page, therefore, and put them here. I don't think that we need to list contributors (especially not on the front page), but we could create a separate page for it (or a separate section on this talk page) if we really wanted to --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 19:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

  • Carandol Has done the majority of the usability formatting, current main contributor
  • Flonejek Improved navigation and copied over a few chapters
I'm still in highschool, and as such this wikibook is a bit of a struggle for me to keep working on, mainly because its too complex for me and I'm too lazy to currently try and comprehend the next few chapters that need work... --flonejek 06:20, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  • Frontier Has written chapters for a number of sections
  • Hfs ???
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