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The Theoretical Minimum (Leonard Susskind)
YouTube
16 recommenders · 15 threads · recommended in 7 years, 2009–2024 · score 19.7
A Stanford continuing-education lecture series by physicist Leonard Susskind, with companion books, covering classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and related topics at roughly upper-high-school to lower-undergraduate math level. Commenters point to free YouTube playlists and the theoreticalminimum.com course page.
Commenters call it an accessible route into real physics for non-specialists, with lectures that are free and paired with problems to work through.
Mathematicsbeginnerfreevideo lectures#classical mechanics#quantum mechanics#relativity#susskind#physics
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20062026
Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum is a favorite of mine. There's a series of lectures on Youtube that accompanies the books.
Check out L.D. Landau's Course of Theoretical Physics if you're open to reading a textbook.
Yes.
Physics concepts are notoriously hard to communicate in natural language. You need to see the math in order to go any deeper than "spacetime cracks."
I highly recommend Leonard Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum" course if you would like to go deeper, and see this fact for yourself: https://theoreticalminimum.com/
I (re-) developed a strong fascination for Physics last year after chancing upon Feynman's QED lectures. It was such mind-boggling stuff and I realized that that was just one level at which nature behaved in utterly magical ways (think - cosmological scales, the question of gravity, unified theory etc).
After trying to scour and even reading many books in this area, most that are either highly abstracted for the 'pop-sci' reader (like me, with no training in physics) or were all-out textbooks, I chanced upon Susskind's lectures and the Theoretical Minimum series. I started off right from the basics and IMHO, it has the right balance between introducing concepts and making sure you internalize them by having you actually work on problems (highly recommend that you don't skip these). I am nowhere near close to understanding any of this yet but it gave me at least an orientation for what to expect and how to prepare. Once I get a bit of time and the interest back again, I expect to go back to the other books in the series.
I can highly recommend Susskind's free continuing education lectures at Stanford https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQrxduI9Pds1fm91Dmn8x... I've done the classical mechanics, special & general relativity series, can't comment on the quantum stuff, but I hear he has some sort of track record in it.
Eh. SICM is a good source for exercises, and the numerical tools it offers are pretty good (has anyone had success getting MIT scheme to behave on OS X?), but it's not the best way to learn modern physics. I recommend Lenny Susskind's awesome lecture series, "Modern Physics, the Theoretical Minimum," at Stanford-On-Youtube. In viewing order:
Classical Mechanics http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=189C0DCE90CB6D81
Quantum Mechanics http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=84C10A9CB1D13841
Special Relativity: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CCD6C043FEC59772
General Relativity (currently in updated once weekly): http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6C8BDEEBA6BDC78D
For those curious but with less ambition (t'Hooft's syllabus is pretty wild for people who don't actually want to work in the field) I'd recommend Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum series. It's a lecture series recorded at Stanford, available for free on Youtube. There's even one or two books by now I believe that cover classical and quantum mechanics. The video lectures go all the way to the standard model, general relativity, cosmology and even some string theory - all of it presented in a way that people with upper high-school or lower undergrad level math knowledge should be able to follow.
For maths and physics lectures, I always got vastly more out of them if I could somehow obtain a summary beforehand and be conscientious enough to read it through. (Similarly, I found the best way to read the Feynman Physics lectures was to read through the published text, then listen to the audio recordings while reading the text. You can do the same with Leonard Susskind's Theoretical Minimum physics lectures).
May I suggest Susskind's lectures:
https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Look... the are bunch of us here who recieved a scientific training. While we don't claim that science can explain everything at the moment, we do claim that there are a lot of crackpots out there with appealing ideas but zero capability of explaining them in a credible fashion.
For some reason these crackpot theories appeal to people who feel for one reason or other that they are "missing something". Then charismatic personalities gravitate towards these communities and spin out yarn that feels right to the specific people listening to them creating a belief. Feels right and belief are the keywords here. There is no proof that would withstand rigorous criticism.
With science, you should love your pet theory, put also put the hard labour in to prove it. And if your testing creates evidence to the contrary, you should be cognitively able to abandon it.
These crackpot theorists start from their pet theory, don't actually study physics or what ever their theory is about, and spend all the effort in spinning yarn about how great their theory is, instead of actually proving it.
If you want to learn about actual physics, there is great introduction lecture series by Leaonard Susskind called "The theoretical minimum":
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL47F408D36D4CF129
Grab a pencil and paper and start watching :) !
What you've quoted there is a good analogy of an entangled state. In reality there are several differences, and the biggest piece of misinformation is that measurement of one system somehow "collapses a wave function" in the other system which isn't the case.
The phenomenon of entanglement is that measurements of certain things are either perfectly correlated or anti-correlated. Eg. Measurement of spin along some axis on electron A will always be -1 when measurement of spin along the same axis of electron B is +1.
The similarity to 2 coins is: if i have a 1972 coin and a 1973 coin, and give one to you randomly, then you go a million light years away and look at your coin and find you have the 1973 coin, you will know I have the 1972 coin. Although this is only a simplified analogy of entanglement the important point is that the state was prepared before we separated, and no information has been communicated. When you try to understand this in terms of classical physics, it's weird. But it's not classical physics. I wrote more about it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10133674
Also check out the leonard susskind messenger lectures for a quick overview and his stanford continuing ed lectures on youtube for the long version :)
The author could instead have used only abstract mathematical language (like "a configuration space with a basis of cardinality 4" and "parameter s defined by s = ..."), but this would be accessible to fewer readers. If you prefer dryer language, read the second half of the article, or the other resources it links to.
Using a configuration space that is a good fit for a specific system is not unusual in math or physics. It's the same thing that astrophysicists do when they work in orbital elements, or that engineers and programmers do when they make calculations in Fourier space. It's worth understanding these concepts even if you're not a physicist.
Configuration spaces are so fundamental and useful that they are introduced in the very first lecture on classical mechanics in Leornard Susskind's excellent series of Stanford physics courses: http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
(Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem also has a simple introduction to configuration spaces in an appendix, because that's the sort of thing that ends up in a Neal Stephenson novel.)
Removing his lectures seems a bit extreme. It's their content, though. They do only mention "MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses" though, so hopefully the lectures will stay up on YouTube. They really are excellent lectures.
That said, I've watched a good portion of Ramamurti Shankar's lectures from Open Yale courses [0]. They're pretty good, but perhaps not broken down as logically as the three courses of Lewin's.
There is also some really good lectures from Leonard Susskind's The Theoretical Minimum [1]. However, these are perhaps a step beyond the normal undergraduate lecture series.
[0] http://oyc.yale.edu/physics
[1] http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Yes, it was amazing. The good news is that it was turned into a book, The Theoretical Minimum. The bad news is that the book was really disappointing. I'm more of a learn-by-reading than learn-by-watching person, but Susskind's lectures are amazing.
If you can accept some tiny bits of math, I'd suggest Susskind's lectures. As close to the real thing as it can get, and almost effortless on your part.
This is interesting, I've watched Professor Susskind's lectures on Quantum Mechanics and they were very good. Was able to understand how QM actually works for the first time.
If you're interested in watching Physics lectures online, don't miss Susskind's excellent series of lectures from Stanford.
http://www.lecture-notes.co.uk/susskind/
Ignoring the moral question in the story, many people are satisfied by saying "haha funny, the cat is both dead and alive" and they just move on.
Reading Pratchett for almost 30 years, it has fueled quite an interested in quantum mechanics in me, he subtly introduces QM teasers in almost every book I read. Particularly Mort.
As I dropped out of highschool, I didnt have the luck to properly study physics, but in my 30s, I my existential crisis hit, as they say, a man dies twice, and the stupid half dead cat wouldn't leave me alone. And one night the omnipotent youtube algorithm recommended Susskind's lectures to me, then Feynman, Shankar, .. it just kept going. Now I watch and re-watch them but take screenshots and send them to claude when I am confused (which is still most of the time).
If you are a layman like me and just want to know what is up with the cat, I encourage you to watch Sean Carroll's lectures (dont miss the Q&A videos) and it will for sure allow you to ask at least better questions.
I love that cat so much.
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Sean Carroll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI09kat_GeI&list=PLrxfgDEc2N...
Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kFOXP026eE&list=PLS3_1JNX8d... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnnEiAjN6U&list=PLYZ3-8b-4z...
Leonard Susskind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI&list=PL6i60qoDQh...
Ramamurti Shankar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK2eFv7ne_Q&list=PLF366409F5...
Barton Zwiebach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jANZxzetPaQ&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...
Carl Bender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYNOGk3ZjFM&list=PL43B1963F2...
If you struggle with calculus, I found Herb Gross to be partucularly good
Herb Gross: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFRWDuduuSw&list=PL3B08AE665...
Of course watch 3blue1brown, alphaphoenix, styropyro etc as well