#790 overall
Special Relativity (Leonard Susskind)
YouTube
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2022 · score 0.7
A YouTube lecture series by Leonard Susskind covering special relativity, from the same course family as his Theoretical Minimum lectures. It treats the core ideas with careful reasoning and some algebra and calculus, and extends them to electromagnetism.
Commenters describe it as a good conceptual grasp of the subject for a lay reader, with the same content a physics major would see but without the problem-solving load.
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20062026
Susskind's excellent lectures are very much a survey of physics. They're great for a lay person trying to get an initial grip on the subject matter. These lectures necessarily can't have the mathematical content that you would see even in an undergrad program. The lectures I've seen introduce the key mathematical ideas but don't exercise them in a way someone learning to be a practitioner would.
Every physics major will spend countless long nights working problems with pages and pages of algebraic manipulation and mathematical reasoning. It is (and must be) much more mathematical than what you see in the Susskind lectures. They're not intended to be an alternative to a traditional program, but IMHO, they do give a true understanding of the main concepts in physics.
Looking at Susskind's youtube, he has massive amount of content on Special Relativity (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD9DDFBDC338226CA). Content-wise, it's the same as what a physics major would see, but without the many, many hours of problem solving exercises. The wonderful thing about Special Relativity is that it takes not a whole lot more than careful reasoning, a fair amount of algebra, and a little calculus to understand. The Susskind lectures actually go a bit farther, applying Special Relativity to Electro-Magnetism
One of the issues that Physics has (as a field) that others do not suffer, is a proliferation of cranks. I suspect that Susskind intends, in part, to counteract the cranks by providing solid, correct informational resources to the general public.