Vibrations and Waves (M.I.T. Introductory Physics Series)
by A. P. French
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Book Summary Information
Author: A. P. FrenchEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1971-01-19
ISBN: 0393099369
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Book Reviews of Vibrations and Waves (M.I.T. Introductory Physics Series)
Book Review: Wonderfully lucid. I should have read this book long ago.
Summary: 5 Stars
Short Review:
The photos and plots in this book are exemplary. They complement the material perfectly, building up intuitional understanding of the phenomena at the same time the text allows you to handle the physics mathematically.
Each chapter follows logically. Everything builds up step by step from the most basic case of a simple harmonic oscillator, and the book has a feeling of progression that encouraged me to keep going. Every chapter brought new understanding to things I vaguely knew about, but was fuzzy on quite why it was that way.
Although the basic systems discussed are pendulums, masses-on-springs, and linear strings, the text also contains plenty of information on how the theory built by examining these simple systems can apply to many other places where the same differential equations apply - especially electric circuits, but also acoustics.
Vibrations and Waves does a superb job as a concise and clear introduction to how wave phenomena work.
Longer Review:
I recently read this book as review while preparing for a more advanced class on quantum mechanics (a theory about waves). I had previously taken a course on vibrations and waves using the (out of print) text by Crawford. Although Crawford's book is probably good, I never read the text carefully though because it was monstrously long.
French presented itself as friendly and readable, without bogging me down in unnecessary detail. It turned out to be exactly that. The chapters were short enough I could read them in one sitting. The problems varied from straightforward applications of what was already stated in the text to ones that made me think for a while, without being so overbearing as to waste my time or become unduly frustrating. There are also answers printed in the back of the book - in my opinion absolutely essential for any book to be used for self-study.
I actually enjoyed reading Vibrations and Waves, which is not the norm for reading physics texts, at least for me. The photos were gorgeous. They were black and white, and not fancy, but the experimental setup used to get the photos was often both clever and instructive. Just when it got difficult to understand just what the equations were saying, there was a picture to demonstrate the system's response. The Lissajous figures and pictures of nodal lines of 2-D surfaces were interesting enough to be worth looking at in their own right.
After reading this book, I feel like I have a much firmer understanding of coupled oscillators and coupled differential equations, the wave equation, refraction, diffraction, and other boundary effects, which were all things I knew enough about to be able to describe, roughly, but not enough about to claim a useful comprehension of the subject.
The introduction of complex numbers and the complex exponential is truly masterful.
I would like to have the time to read French's other introductory physics books, but even if I don't I'll remain glad to have read this one.
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