Customer Reviews

Vibrations and Waves in Physics

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a physics and math major, I was EXTREMELY disappointed in the lack of examples in this text. Learning physics involves more than abstract mathematical knowledge, it involves examining the material in many real world situations.

If you are considering assigning this text for your course, I beg you to reconsider. Your students will thank you!

Based on the small number of reviews here, this work appears to be relatively unknown and unsung here. Allow me to contribute a hearty "thumbs up" here because I feel it is a great packaging of well-selected basics and intuition. If you are a student advancing in physics and dynamics, I hope it at least gets on your list of things to check out.

I personally love this book! However, I am long beyond (in time, if not in learning) introductory physics; so let me try to make an informed recommendation.

I think this should be your SECOND waves book. I can see how readers using it for a first exposure to waves or partial differential equations can feel challenged, as it is concise and often leaves you alone. And in return for its conciseness it treats a wider and more advanced set of topics than I remember in my "first" introduction books: Eg, nice first tastes of nonlinearity, solitons, water waves.

But at this slightly advanced level of this book, it has a lot to offer, and I find it unique:

- The topic selection is terrific! Just to give you an example: It provides an introductory treatment of the Klein-Gordon equation (and I don't know why other basic books don't), nicely illustrated in the book as a system involving something like a set of mattress box springs. If you happen to go on to more advanced work, eg quantum physics and the origin of mass, you might think back to this "mattress" picture and have some extra basic intuition about it. This is just one example of how I find that the topics selected by this book "fall into place" elsewhere in my travels.

- The book sticks to an introductory level on the wide variety of topics and uses the short space to convey fundamental intuition. It is certainly not a thorough / detailed / last word treatment on any of the topics-- but I would not want to bore myself reading such technical detail cover to cover. Instead, I can almost imagine an author that very much sees the big picture-- bigger than can fit into many books--, carefully chose the most important aspects and intuitions to convey, and then enthusiastically, perhaps impatiently, tried to compress and convey it as fast as possible.

Lastly, as a "later" book you study on the subject, its conciseness and speed might be just right-- eg, good for a fast track conceptual review without fluff. What was my "first" book on this subject? I don't even remember now. But this book is still on my shelf, on my mind, and I'm thankful enough to write a review!

As some people have mentioned, this book is impossible to read. The derivations are unclear, the content lacks motivation, and the dull writing style makes the book a real chore to read. Do yourself a favor and read a different book on waves. Try Waves by Frank S. Crawford.

Pros: Good subject matter (very interesting), Pace of material is slow at first and builds at a good rate.
Cons: Needs worked problems, lacks in-depth derivation, low readability, some sections of certain chapters lack all substance entirely.
If you have a good teacher, this book is helpful...if not, sorry, you won't get much.

In addition to the comments of the previous two readers who have not been very impressed with the book, I would like to say that the mathematical treatment is very vague as well.
Hence, the book neither gives a rigorous mathematical treatment of the subject, nor does it succeed in presenting the underlying physics.

I found this text extremely hard to follow due to the abstract mathmatical derivations with little to no explanation of where things are coming from and no examples. Being a physics major, this is an important class for me, and I feel that my learning could be aided by use of a clearer text with examples on how to use the math we are given. For example, in chapter 4, question 5c asks us to find the sticking friction. Looking just above to the section on sticking friction is no help because it tells you nothing on how to find it.

This book is impossibly hard to read. They just seem to throw formulas at you without clear mathematical derivation. They constantly refer to formulas in past chapters (only by reference number, 3.12) and expect you to remember the formula and follow along. Chapter 8 alone has 34 formulas, and those are just the ones deemed important enough for reference numbers, there are plenty more.

I spend most of my time flipping through the book and trying to understand their math rather than understanding the SUBJECT. The formulas are also written in one line format with lots of parenthesis and exponents of 1/2, instead of square root symbols and numerator over denomenator notation. This all makes the book very distracting and worse if your teacher just teaches from the book