Customer Reviews

Classical Mechanics (Addison-Wesley series in physics)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" appeared at the right time. The development of quantum mechanics demanded familiarity with methods of advanced mechanics that no student of physics had been introduced to. Dirac told in a semminar that he didn't know what a Poisson bracket was, when he was constructing his version ot quantum mechanics (where Poisson brackets play a fundamental role). Heisenberg didn't know matrices, in similar circumstances. Max Born did know these things, and actually wrote a superb book on mechanics using them, but it was in German, at an advanced level and called Mechanics of the Atom. The book then available in English was the formidable Whittaker "Analytical Dynamics", whose exercises took sometimes a whole page just to be stated! In this panorama, in the fifties, Addison-Wesley published the beautifully produced Goldstein. It was an instant sensation. In the introduction the author candidly confessed that, in his opinion, a cou! rse in mechanics justified itself only as a preparation for quantum mechanics, and that was clearly the slant of the book. It was extremely well written, except for a disastrous chapter on the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. The exercises were not at the level of the text: you found much better ones in Slater, Frank's "Mechanics", for instance. The references were excellent, commented, and gave the reader a sense of perspective (and of awe, in the company of men like Riemann, Born, Weber...). I loved the book and hated the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Later on the slim book by Landau, Lifshitz, "Mechanics", entered the scene and showed that Goldstein's program could be made better, briefer, and that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, clearly and sensibly derived, was the jewel of the crown. Not only, in the subsequent volumes of their Theoretical Physics course, they showed how invaluable this Hamilton-Jacobi was, by applying it with great skill in all kinds of problems.! Then, finally, it became clear that mechanics was not dead! : the whole affair of stability, chaos, etc, exploded, and it became impossible to consider mechanics just as a ladder to quantum mechanics. So, even the philosophy of the venerable Goldstein had to be forgotten. Still, Goldstein's Classical Mechanics is alive, possibly now more Classical than Mechanics.

I read the first printing of the third edition.

Cons first.

Some material has been deleted: the discussions of stability, some historical notes along the discussions, correspondence between HJ and Schrodinger Eqn, etc. The nice further references and notes to various other books in the end of each chapter has been omitted, the same thing happen to the extensive bibliography. A lot of typos appear in this new edition. And still no attempts to include advanced mathematical methods from differential geometry, except when discussing SR. Also, no attempt to include some worked examples. The discussions on classical fields has been shortened, a regret if we remember the need to leard classical fields before step into quantum fields.

Pros.

The book became more accessible, in fact some undergrads might be able to cope with this, either after Marion-Thornton or somewhere in the junior-senior year. The discussions on SR use the standard -2 metric instead of the awkward ict. Several discussions on one-forms and GR appeared. More problems. Also there is a new chapter in nonlinear oscillations

Suggestions.

If you want a modern book on classical mechanics check also J.V. Jose and E.J. Saletan, Classical Dynamics: A Contemporary Approach ... it offers roughly the same material PLUS advanced treatment with geometrical methods and differential geometry, and there are extensive discussions on nonlinear dynamics and classical fields. I recommend some instructors to adapt Jose & Saletan for their class, since it is cheaper, more modern, than Goldstein.

This is probably the best treatment of Classical Mechanics I've ever read, though, as with anything, it could use some improvement. My only gripe is the usual one with texts like this: There are few if any specific physical instances of formulations that so often serve as a watershed of understanding in physics. For example, in the derivation of the Langrangian, and finally the Hamiltonian, no point for point physical example (say, with a central force like gravity) is offered. It would be nice to see a step by step description of how the Riemann sum over time of the difference in kinetic and potential energies changes as different paths are chosen. I did this and it was beautiful and incredibly enlightening. Once you can _see_ that kind of behavior, you're powerful! It is then easy to generalize to any abstract system. But all else was excellent. If you really want to learn Mechanics, you must start with Goldstein. Recommended preliminaries: Stewart's Calculus; Schaum's Linear Algebra; Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics and Symon's Mechanics.

This is a good book for an advanced undergraduate to learn classical mechanics from, and also for the beginning graduate student who didn't learn about some of the somewhat more advanced topics in the subject, like the theory of canonical transformations and the Hamilton-Jacobi theory (I fell into the later camp, by the way). Yes, Landau is more concise and elegant, but for me at least it has served better as a reference now that I have mastered Goldstein (Landau is an excellent author, but I believe I am not alone in saying that it is very difficult to learn a subject for the first time from his books!)

Unlike other reviewers, I have no substantial complaints about the problems. Granted, there are some that are not very deep, but you can simply skip those if you like! And I find them nowhere near as difficult as Jackson problems!

By the way, I encourage you to read with a skeptical eye - I found several mistakes and typos in the book. Perhaps there is a catalog of these somewhere on the Addison-Wesley web site?

Oh, one final thing - I think it is out of line to compare this book with Abraham and Marsden - they have totally different objectives. Goldstein's aim is to develop in the student a solid grasp of the **basics** of mechanics - one must master Goldstein (or a book like it) before he or she understands the subject well enough to even decide whether Abraham and Marsden is a worthwhile endeavour!

This is an excellent way to learn classical mechanics. Actually, I prefer Landau's book. But Landau's book is about 170 pages and this one is about 650 pages.

And you get much more material with this book. The book is readable, and there are plenty of useful exercises. You start off with Lagrange's equations. Then you learn a little about the calculus of variations. And then the central force problem, kinematics of rigid body motion, and oscillations. And there's material on Hamilton's equations, canonical transformations, and Hamilton-Jacobi theory. In this manner, the text covers in 420 pages what Landau does in 170. There are more explanations and more examples. It's not a bad way to learn the subject.

In addition, there are chapters on special relativity, chaos, canonical perturbation theory, and continuous systems and fields. These are good topics to cover in a upper division class on mechanics. This book has a lot to offer a student and would be fun to teach from.

This book is great for learning the topic for the first time, and even better once you're looking for a good reference at a later time. It goes very deeply into the physics and philosophy of classical mechanics. The only background needed is vector calculus. The rest should flow naturally. If you don't understand everything on the first read, as some reviewers mentioned, this is not really a problem. This often happens with advanced textbooks, the authors know so much that they can't help but write discussions that are of a more general nature. In the case of Goldstein, you should be able to keep on reading without getting lost. This book is amazing, it covers point-particle physics up to continuum mechanics, and builds everything up to a point where you can go on a and study relativity and quantum mechanics with good confidence.

I would give this book 6 stars if I could. However, the 3rd edition has turned what used to be an excellent book into some kind of butchery and orgy or less relevant topics. For example, very few people doing research actually care about chaos theory, aside from its coolness. While I learned this stuff from a mathematically rigorous standpoint decades ago, I never got to use it since then. Also I find it difficult to discuss chaos theory when stochastic processes are ignored. When doing experiments, you always deal with noise which will actually bury a lot of the interesting dynamics. I really don't see the point of altering Goldstein to cover chaos theory when several excellent textbooks on the topic already exist (Arnold, Devaney, Scheinermann).

I bought the 3rd edition without knowing about its new slant. At the very least, they should have kept what was in the 2nd edition. Instead, they deleted entire sections which I used to love, such as the derivation of the Lagrangian density for an acoustic field (Appendix E). It's totally gone! I am no longer using the 3rd edition copy, and would consider selling it or getting rid of it. I am much better off with my 2nd edition copy.

I gave this book a 4-star because some parts of it are in fact not so clearly written, as some of the previous reviewers have pointed out. Yet it is probably the only book out there that explains classical mechanics at the level of sophistication and comprehensiveness suitable for an advanced physics student. This book is aimed at the graduate audience but in my opinion any undergraduate students with a solid introductory mechanics course should have no problem understanding most of the materials in this book though I have to admit that the authors did not do a very good job in explaining the concepts.

A distinct feature of this book is that it tries to teach classical mechanics in a way that illuminates many analogous approaches in quantum theory. By this I mean the theoretical constructions such as the Hamilton-Jacobi theory, Poisson brackets, canonical perturbation theory, relativistic field theory, and so on. This book is probably a must read for beginners of theoretical physics because some of the theoretical methods exploited here appear almost ubiquitously in other fields of physics. In the study of other subjects of physics, I was often reminded of the little bits of things I picked up from this book: variational principles, tensors and forms, symmetry groups, field theoretical ideas, etc.

Of course, the main goal of this book is to introduce the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics. The book is actually strong in this aspect. The first few chapters I think are very well written, especially the chapter on central force which is the most thorough treatment I have seen. There are things one hardly sees in other books of this type, such as the Lenz vector which would find a beautiful use in the quantum Kepler problem. However, the book tends to lose clarity in the latter chapters. The three chapters on Hamiltonian mechanics can be much better written. The chapter on chaos serves as nothing but a really rough introduction. Readers interested in these areas will probably benefit better by looking at other books written exclusively on Hamiltonian dynamics or chaos.

After all this is a good book mostly because I haven't yet found any other book at this level that does a better job. If one finds it difficult to read I would suggest getting the book by Marion and Thornton which contains many step-by-step derivations and tons of examples and in my opinion serves as a great companion to this book. Another book at almost the same level is the legendary book by Landau which is extremely concise and get-to-the-point. So some people may like Landau's style better. However, in my opinion, no other books can really replace this one as a comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics.

This book was originally written in 1950. Inspite of its age, it is still a masterpiece in its kind. The author's approach is very attentive to developing the physical intuition, which makes the book an easy reading. The breadth of coverage is remarkable: along with relativity (and a bit of electromagnetism), it covers the mechanics of continua, too. The wide coverage more than pays back the effort of reading the relatively long text. Last but not least, the book is very well suited for self-study thanks to both its clarity and the many exercises provided (without solutions, unfortunately). Overall, it's still unsurpassed if you want to understand mechanics by yourself at the beginning graduate level. For the sake of this purpose, neither Landau not Arnold (two other masterpieces) come close. Rather, I recommend you to first read Goldstein and some time later read Arnold.

Even more then 30 years later, this book is still the standard in mechanics for graduate courses. Working through it will give an excellent understanding of mechanics. However, due to its age it falls a little short on some areas such as relativity. It woudl need an overhaul here. Yet, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, so it should not be misunderstood here. What is needed here is an update on more recent developments in relativity and this is the primary reason why I couldn't give it a five star. Also, if one studies Goldstein first, then working on Jackson's Electrodynamics poses relatively little problems since the mathematical level is effectively the same as required in both books. Nevertheless, starting with Goldstein will be easier then with Jackson.

This book is the "standard" classical mechanics book for intro graduate courses. It provides a good in-depth coverage of the subject and is mostly easy to follow and understand given the correct mathematical background.