#324 overall
8.03 Physics III: Vibrations and Waves
MIT OpenCourseWare
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2012–2020 · score 1.5
MIT OpenCourseWare's undergraduate Physics III course on vibrations, waves, and related physics, presented as recorded video lectures from the Fall 2004 offering. It is part of the MIT physics sequence commenters point to for self-study.
Commenters describe MIT OCW as remarkably complete and of higher quality than many university offerings, and one points to a specific lecture on the physics of rainbows.
Recommendations by year
20062026
Back in the day I self-studied through MIT OCW, and found it remarkably complete. It's better in quality than what you would get at almost all universities, including MIT itself (!), because only the best lecturers tend to get immortalized on OCW.
Going through the series 8.012, 8.022, 8.03, 8.033, 8.04, 8.044, 8.05, 8.06 will give you the core theoretical knowledge of a physics major. (I assume you already know all the relevant math background.) If you prefer lecture notes, I imagine the best thing is to go through David Tong's lecture notes [0] from start to finish, as these cover almost the entire Cambridge undergraduate curriculum very clearly. If you want textbooks, at least in America, the books one uses for these courses are pretty standardized, and Fowler's blog post lays out these standard choices. For more advanced books, I have a pretty extensive bibliography in the front matter of my personal lecture notes [1].
0: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html 1: https://knzhou.github.io/#lectures
There is a great lecture on the physics of rainbows on MIT's Open Courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-03-physics-iii-vibratio...