Resources and fun links
The syllabus has a book list. Here are some websites. These are by no means necessary for the course, but may be useful and interesting alternatives to learn material or to supplement what we are learning in class. Let me know if you find other interesting or useful resources.
Sites with lecture videos (and more):
- "Engineering Dynamics" at MIT. Although it's a mechanical engineering course, it covers very similar topics to Phys 301.
- "Dynamics and Control" at MIT. Another mechanical engineering course. In addition to standard classical dynamics topics, it covers topics in control theory: rather than simply taking a system and predicting its evolution, one attempts to find ways to drive a system along some desired evolution in a way that is robust to imperfections in the design or our knowledge of the system.
- Susskind lectures on classical mechanics. This is the first course of the "theoretical minimum", a modern take on Landau's famous theoretical minimum he required to become his student.
- Mahoney lectures on classical mechanics. An intermediate mechanics course at MgGill with videos and lecture notes.
Wikipedia seeds
Here are some seeds from Wikipedia that can easily blosson into a lost day.
- Classical mechanics Overview of classical mechanics
- Analytic mechanics. A (relatively looseldy defined) name that encompasses much of what we will do in this course.
- An (exceedingly brief) history of classical mechanics
- Rocket equation Equation governing motion of projectiles ejecting mass as propellant.
- Various formulations of classical mechanics. We will cover about half of these topics, and touch on some others through homework. The rest are just for fun. Newtonian, Hamilton's principle, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, Liouville equation, Poisson brackets, Hamilton-Jacobi, Gibbs-Appell, Koopman-von Neumann ,
- Nonlinear dynamics and chaos
Classical mechanics for entertainment:
- Kerbal Space program Build and (surprisingly realistically) simulate rockets in this game.
- Chaoscope A tool for making aesthetically appealing artwork or visualizations of strange attractors and other phenomena in nonlinear dynamics.