The Shaggy Steed of Physics: Mathematical Beauty in the Physical World

Rating:
Summary: The Action
Review: This is an elegant and short, yet comprehensive, account of analytical mechanics that ties the whole subject from classical physics to quantum mechanics into a conceptual unity. Opening with an Irish tale of the shaggy steed, the work derives all the basics of the Langrangian and Hamiltonian with dispatch and has a quality of brevity and completeness that is remarkable, perhaps due to the nature of the subject matter itself, in the elegant enigmas of the 'action principle'. This field not being my specialty (an understatement), and after beating a hasty retreat to the Schaum outline of Lagrangian Mechanics for some quick refresher calisthenics I was able to scratchpad my way into a birdseye view of the subject, in a way that threw a new light on the genesis of Quantum Mechanics, the grandchild of these novel formulations of physics using their 'maths with a wallop' that began appearing in the generations after Newton. For crackshots in this field the more advanced material on invariants and Noether's theorem bind the material into a still deeper splendid unity. Amazing book.