Customer Reviews

The Physics of Vibrations and Waves, 6th Edition

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In a book wrought with errors, vagueness, tortuous notation, almost no examples, and very little use as a reference book, I can't imagine why any professor or student would want to pick this book up, expensive at it is, let alone assign it for a class. The topics are presented incompletely, jumping around from subtopic to subtopic without ever defining concepts, showing good techniques for applying physical intuition and mathematical reasoning, or fully exploring some of the mathematics involved. Where mathematical rigor would be desirable for pedagogy, none is applied. Where a demonstrative example would be useful, none is given. Where even a small one sentence definition would have been useful, nothing is there. The example questions are simply horrendous; all of them are "show/prove that ..." in structure, with half being of the "plug in numbers" type that gives no understanding, and the other being of the "derive this equation" type in a part of the book where understanding and derivation has been deemphasized in order to introduce new, undefined vocabulary words and constants. Not to mention, the vast number of errors in the problems makes it all the harder to obtain any understanding at all. All in all, a fairly horrendous book; it's hard to understand why it has become so popular or even reached the sixth edition at all.

I am a math and physics student, and I was in two courses where this book was the "official" text. In the first course, the professor was very hopeful at the beginning of the semester. As we progressed through the course, it became apparent that many of the problems were incorrectly formulated, leading to impossible, nonsensical, answers, or to none at all.

In the second course, the professor---a top researcher who wrote his PhD thesis under Dr. Steven Weinberg---told us on the first day, "The book is posted as the official class text, but you can sell it back right now. If I use any problems from this book, I'll make copies for you." The professor taught from his personally created notes for the course, which were excellent.

From the perspective of an average undergraduate physics or engineering major who is taking his or her first transition-into-upper-level-physics class, this book by H.J. Pain is an overwhelming, confusing sludge of unclear derivations, incorrect problems, and a whimsical ordering of material. The problems are often challenging---but you cannot solve the majority of them after reading the corresponding chapter. Furthermore, many of the problems are errorenous, lead to physically improbable, or even impossible, results, sometimes with incorrect units for the desired quantities. I posit that the only reason someone should own this book is to be able to copy down the assigned problem from class.

Looking at the text right now, I think I could learn---or have learned already!---how NOT to present the material. Much of the material is more suitable for an upper-division optics class. For example, the very first chapter, which begins talking about specific mechanical oscillators with no introduction to the material, later makes a terrifying jump cut to "Superposition of Several Waves" and "Polarization of Light". Much of the later material is haphazardly ordered, and some of it is even from upper-level or graduate courses on condensed matter!

This brings me to another major fault: the author provides very little, or zero motivation for the physics discussion. This accompanies great leaps of faith in the derivations, as well as seeming mathematical "miracles", leaving the freshman or early-sophomore (1st year and 2nd year, respectively, for those of you overseas) behind in the mathematical dust.

Not only does the author make transitions that are difficult-to-follow, he seems to taunt his readers with confidence-crumbling "obviously"s, "it should be clear to the reader that", and other such phrases, instead of, perhaps, parenthetically justifying the next step (e.g. "by conservation of momentum", or "subsituting from Eq. 6.2 and dividing both sides by common terms,"). Looking back, I can see how to tie the material together, but that knowledge comes from optics and modern physics courses I've taken, as well as background reading.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, The UT physics department has DONE AWAY WITH this book and has gone back to the Berkeley Waves course:
http://www.amazon.com/Waves-Berkeley-Physics-Course-WAVES/dp/0070048606

And the MIT Vibrations and Waves book by A.P. French:
http://www.amazon.com/Vibrations-Waves-M-I-T-Introductory-Physics/dp/0393099369

Some professors also use Hecht's "Optics":
http://www.amazon.com/Optics-4th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0805385665/


I sincerely hope you enjoy your study of waves and find the resources you need.

This book is utterly useless! Pain (an appropriate last name for the author of this book) gives little to no explanation for what he does in this book which leaves the reader confused as to what he is trying to show. The few explanations he does provide are often written in a convoluted manner and do not convey the material at all. The book is also extremely inconsistent. It assumes that you have no previous experience with partial derivatives, differential equations or complex numbers yet at the same time gives you problems that require extensive knowledge of many different areas of physics at the graduate level. As a sophomore undergraduate, I found this extremely annoying. The book is also filled with errors in the equations, text and problems that can lead to unnecessary confusion. It almost seems that Pain tried to make this textbook as horrible as possible.

Hopefully, if you have to use this book for a class, you will have a decent professor is who is able to pick up Pain's slack. If you are as unlucky as me and have a horrible professor while using this book, then I suggest buying French's MIT series Waves and Vibrations book. It is written much better. Another suggestion is to watch the video lectures on MIT's Open Courseware for a similar class taught at MIT. The class is called Physics III: Waves and Vibrations with a course number of 8.03. The lectures are extremely helpful and are completely free :). The lectures can be found via the MIT website and they are also availabe on YouTube. My ultimate advice for this book is to avoid it if possible.

This textbook is awful in just about every respect. The author fails to include any exposition as to what is being discussed and resorts to the more lazy approach of just spitting out a jumbled mess of equations. In fact, the entire text is plagued by laziness. The author leaves out many crucial derivations, sometimes in which he makes some very unobvious mathematical manipulations, which leaves the reader rather confused as to what exactly is going on. The problems at the end of the chapters are ridiculous and offer no insight into the subject as they merely ask to "show that.... " or "derive this...." which usually amounts to nothing more than the use of trig. identities and other manipulations.
I used this textbook for a 3rd-semester honors undergraduate physics course that dealt with waves and optics and found this textbook absolutely useless. The only time I glanced through the book was because my professor assigned problems from it. Never use this textbook to learn waves and optics, please... please purchase Bekefi and Barrett's book: Electromagnetic Vibrations, Waves and Radiation if you want to learn the material.

After taking a mechanics class using the excellent Kleppner book, and an electromagnetism class using the equally excellent Purcell book, I was shocked by how completely terrible this book was. I did not think physics texts could do this bad a job performing such a text's primary task- explaining physics.


This is not a physics text, it is a math text. Unfortunately, it is not a decent exposition of mathematics either.

A physics text, especially at the introductory level this text is meant to achieve, should not focus on math without building physical intuition concurrently. The books I mentioned above focus on developing this sort of intuition to help readers understand when they need to use the math and how to apply it. After I would read those books, I would feel like I knew something more about physics AND math. After reading Pain's book, however, I never felt this way; often I felt like I understood the material less than when I started reading!

If you really want to read about waves, I don't have a good recommendation for you because from what I have heard from my waves professor and TA there aren't many (I'm assuming there may be some, but I'm not entirely sure) good texts on waves. However, I definitely recommend not buying this book, as nobody in my class could stand using it (including the professor, who only realized how inadequate it was when it was too late to change the course's primary text). Perhaps a more rewarding strategy would be to first read a good math book that discusses the wave equation at length and only then start reading physics texts that treat wave phenomena.

This book was chosen as a text for a course in Vibrations and Waves that I took. Within weeks, the overall consensus among everyone in the course was that this is, as far as any of us are aware, perhaps the worst textbook ever written on any subject.

The book is opaque, and yet astonishingly verbose, full of typos, and incapable of explaining anything to someone who doesn't already know the topic. The problems at the ends of chapters are largely "here is a result, show it is true by algebraically manipulating these other formulae" -- it is possible to answer dozens of such problems without learning even a tiny bit of physics.

Some derivations in this book are so incomprehensible that no amount of reading and re-reading will produce comprehension even in the most mathematically sophisticated student. In other cases, extensive study and examination of other references will sometimes -- sometimes -- reveal what Pain is trying to say.

This is the sixth edition of the book. I can't believe either that enough people bought the previous editions to justify the printing of this one, or that this is the best that could have been achieved after five previous attempts.

If you are interested in this topic, I recommend, instead, the excellent "Vibrations and Waves" by A.P. French, which is far thinner and yet far more thorough. As just one example, H.J. Pain (quite an apt name) says, about complex notation, that i "may be considered an operator which rotates vectors 90 degrees". That's thrown out to you without any further explanation of any sort. A.P. French, by contrast, spends pages developing your understanding of complex notation. As I mentioned, however, although French is far more thorough and explains things far better, his textbook is a fraction of the size, is still in its first edition, and is far cheaper.

I still remember the time when i was a stressed-out EECS undergraduate, desperately trying to figure out what's going on in my "Waves" class. The professor was one of these guys that could make you forget what you already knew and at the time i fully trusted the recommended textbooks. I didn't read reviews or study from other books.

I cringe even now when i think about the countless hours i dedicated trying to figure out what was going on. I must have studied this book for months and got nothing in return. Mr Pain fails to communicate even the most basic ideas about waves and jumps from topic to topic like a grasshoper. Things like "standing wave", "travelling wave" and "mode" were unknown to me as the semester was ending...

I don't exactly know how i managed not to fail the class (the grade was horrible of course) but the important thing is that i learned NOTHING about waves. And that created an avalanche phenomenon that resulted in me having TREMENDOUS problems later on. Now that i know all the material, i feel angry and bitter at the fact that such a horrendous book even exists, let alone be the recommended one for the class.

Stay away from this book at all costs.

Rather than repeating what previous reviewers have said, I'll just note that I would like to strap this book to a block of C-4 and turn it into fine ash.

What a useless, unhelpful, jumbled mess. I spent probably a good couple hundred hours staring in agony at this book for my Waves & Optics course, hoping that it could fill in the gaps where my even less competent professor had said little. Unlike every textbook that I've used previously in my career as a student since elementary school, you *cannot* learn the concepts from this book if you just bring a certain amount of intelligence and enough time to it. There's simply not enough explanation in this book to do it. I spent hours on the problems and yet learned nothing from them, because they were a test of my mathematical derivation skills and not of any concepts explained and taught in the book. If you already are familiar with the subject matter of this book, it may appear to be adequate, but it's terribly insufficient, making huge leaps and jumps and omissions that leave the reader seeking alternate sources of explanation. Avoid this book like the plague.