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This first-year, graduate-level text and reference book covers the fundamental concepts and twenty-first-century applications of six major areas of classical physics that every masters- or PhD-level physicist should be exposed to, but often isn't: statistical physics, optics (waves of all sorts), elastodynamics, fluid mechanics, plasma physics, and special and general relativity and cosmology. Growing out of a full-year course that the eminent researchers Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford taught at Caltech for almost three decades, this book is designed to broaden the training of physicists. Its six main topical sections are also designed so they can be used in separate courses, and the book provides an invaluable reference for researchers.
About the author
Kip S. Thorne & Roger D. Blandford
Summary
Covers the fundamental concepts and twenty-first-century applications of six major areas of classical physics that every masters- or PhD-level physicist should be exposed to, but often isn't: statistical physics, optics (waves of all sorts), elastodynamics, fluid mechanics, plasma physics, and special and general relativity and cosmology.
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"An excellent tool for students and researchers as an introduction to classical subjects usually missing from most modern physics curricula. . . . A valuable reference for physicists about modern approaches of the development and applications of classical physics."---Miguel A. F. Sanjuán, Contemporary Physics
Report
"Remarkable for its scope and authority, this text offers a new vision of the 'theoretical minimum' of classical physics that all physicists should know, a vision that I hope will revitalize the curricula of many physics departments. On my own shelf it will replace half a dozen dog-eared reference texts."--Scott Tremaine, Institute for Advanced Study