Great Ideas of Classical Physics

by Steven Pollock

This book is about classical how things move, why they move, and how they work. It's about making sense of motion, gravity, light, heat, sound, electricity, and magnetism, and seeing how these phenomena interweave to create the rich tapestry of everyday experience.

Genres: Science, Physics, Nonfiction, Audiobook, History

Paperback

First published January 28, 2006

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. I'm not saying I understood (or gave my full attention) to every part of this, but I came away feeling like I had learned some things. I also loved how it combined both history and science.

Note: This did not affect my rating, but I appreciated how Pollock was fair to the bible and Christianity in the brief mentions of them related to Galileo.

[Chris Esposo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a bad “Great Courses” audiobook, it's just not really stellar. Given the subject matter, classical physics, there is no dearth of material from the elementary perfunctory instructional domains of high-school textbooks, to more advanced collegiate/graduate text, and everything in between, including conceptual texts for mass-market consumption. This work goes straight into the vast bucket of sameness in that Borges-esque library. Put in another way, if I were to put the Feynman lectures on one end of that spectrum, and the “representative high school textbook” for classical physics on the other, this book is very close to the later, and pretty far from the later.

Again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. However, I’ve always stated that for an installment of the “Great Courses” to truly be “great” it needs to come at the material it’s covering in a unique way. Sean Caroll’s “Higgs Boson and Beyond” is a good example of what can be done, and still be relatively conceptual, yet decently rigorous with some functional knowledge. This installment, like many other older “Great Courses” additions, feels more like the preface-sections for a physics textbook chapter, rather than self-contained treatments on the respective topics.

The author does a good job going through the material, which includes a chapter on pre-Copernican/Gallielian thought, the Galilean kinematics, Newtonian mechanics, the new synthesis of Newton mechanics of energy, which takes the study purely from a phenomenological subject to something that starts to become more abstract, and the post-Newtonian study on electricity, which ends right before the modern theory of the atom. I thought of the bunch, the author's discussion on energy was well-done.

Yet, again nothing here is really new, and because the author omits all of the mathematics, it’s hard to really gain much from the reading. If the author had a new ‘shtick” on the subject , maybe he could try teaching everything purely from the Lagrangian standpoint and try to make that synthesis “consumable” to introductory layman, something like that, this book would be worth it. But with no distinguishable “voice”/perspective on the instructional side, this book is mostly just a “meh”. Conditional recommend if you have nothing else to read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pollock is an outstanding lecturer. It is stunning to me that questions about how the world works were solely the domain of philosophers until the 17th century. Why didn't Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle think do running experiments? Not until Galileo and Newton almost two thousand years later did western thinkers start to test their hypotheses in a systematic way. Great course!

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3 out of 5]

This a basic overview of the development of physics without a lot of the history that goes along with it. The focus is on basic principles with some explanations. I'd recommend these lectures for high school students. This probably explains why Professor Pollock uses the phrase "mucking around" to mean "playing around" or "experimenting". He is encouraging the listener to try something. (And he warns when "trying something" might be dangerous.)

I doubt I will listen to these lectures again, but I was glad to listen.

[Bill Phelps · Rating 5 out of 5]

This lecture series is an excellent overview of the big ideas that make up physics. The lectures involve little no math and purely talk about the development, concepts, and application of the foundational principles that make up physics. I highly recommend this as an audiobook to get a good broad understanding of these concepts and the history of how they developed.

[Nightshadequeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty reasonable overview of classical physics without calculus. More meant for the lay person, I think, or perhaps a high school student.

Lectures were very engaging though. Pretty fun to listen to.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book! Not just for those interested in "classical physics" but for anyone interested in understanding the world around them more clearly.
Plus it's an excellent follow-up to high school physics.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great lecture series covering the spectrum of physics principles (no pun intended) and their historical discovery. The verbal "math" explanations were well done. The content was geared towards both a technical and non-technical audience.

[James Biser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steven Pollock is an excellent lecturer. In this collection of essays that are presented as lectures, he discusses the basic ideas of physics and explores the history of physicists who discovered and taught the ideas historically. It is an interesting introduction to classical physics.

[Reg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic information; excellent professor.

[Suzanned99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This turned out to be one of my favorite Great Courses. It’s definitely for the layperson though.

[Richard Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rather enjoyed this book.

It's not an in depth study of classical physics, but something of a whistle stop tour. Informative but light.

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good review course on physics, with a lecturer who is easy to listen to and understand. Nothing really stands out in my memory of it, but I think it did strengthen my understanding of the subject and gave me some new perspectives on various matters. Actually, though I'm not sure I can easily articulate what I learned from this series, I do find that I've internalized a lot of what was covered, particularly thinking about energy, momentum, and the working of physics in daily life in a way that I didn't think of it before.

[Chandra Prakash · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is the Natural State of Motion?
a/c to Newton it was uniform motion in particular direction but a/c Einstein it was the state of free fall

[J.D. Steens · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Teaching Company production provides a good overview for the lay person about classical physics. Unlike many other introductions to complex subject matter, Prof. Pollock is fairly clear most of the time. Pollock provides a context(e.g., contrasting with Aristotle's views)out of which Newton formulated the basic ideas of classical physics, the laws governing the visible (everyday) universe. Pollock's course moves up to quantum physics which, he stresses, is not a replacement of Newton, but builds upon, expands, and refines that classical foundation. This course about the natural world prompts questions about the relationship to life and humans that are products of the material, physical world. Specicially, the question is whether or how life forms do or do not operate consistent with the laws of classical physics: Is there a relationship between push-pull, inertia and the field forces of classical physics and the motion (seeking-attracting; resistance) expressed by all life forms? Are biology and spirit matter and energy?

[Haleygeek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had a good deal of physics, but it's nice to get a refresher. This was entertaining, as well as informative, and I wish I had been able to read it while in high school BEFORE I took college physics. Rather than focusing on equations (though they are mentioned), it focuses on how Newton, Faraday, etc took big questions about the universe and tried to solve them using simple methods and hand-calculated math. It took many years for me to realize it was the relationships of the components and not the equations themselves that are important. This book would have saved me a big headache!

[Missmath144 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prof. Steven Pollock of Colorado University presents this 24-lecture series on classical physics. His explanations are very clear and accompanied by many simple experiments that one can carry out at home (but also easily visualized just by listening to him). The lectures are appropriate for a non-science major or even a bright middle- or high-school student. I enjoyed them immensely and learned a lot on the way.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Passionate lectures that both trace the history of Physics and explain most of the primary concepts. The subject matter can be hard for me to grasp as well as other science fields, but this was presented in layman's language with clear examples. Makes me look at a marble, a car, a wave, a bicycle, and Scotch tape in a completely different way.

[Mario Streger · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a very good course for learning and remembering basic concepts of physics. It gives you an overall view of the first centuries of science, with little math. Worth listening to.

[VIXEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Anders Risager · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've listened to this lecture several times, but I still keep learning and remembering new things each time I listen through it.

There are soo many things to know about the world!