Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
This is a great book but a bit dense first. At a high level it goes through physics with an optimization viewpoint, as in find the actions that minimize a system's energy to figure out how a system will evolve.<p>I would strongly suggest you learn Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics from this book first [1] since it comes with many more illustrations and simple arguments that'll make reading SICM much easier. If you don't have time to read a whole book and want to get the main idea I've written a blog post about Lagragian mechanics myself [2] which has made it to the front page of Hacker News before. The great thing about SICM is that it's a physics textbook where the formulas are replaced by code [3] which you means you can play around with your assumptions to gain intuition for how everything works.<p>IMO I believe in introductory physics we overemphasize formalism over intuition and playing around with simulators is a truer way to explore physics since most physical laws were derived via experimentation not derivation. Another book that really drives this point home is [4]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jakob-Schwichtenberg/dp/1096195380/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Jakob-Schwichtenberg/dp/1096195380/re...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-turn-physics-into-an-optimization-problem-11b3fbf83062?gi=b6b2beb291f5" rel="nofollow">https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-turn-physics-into-an-opti...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/hnarayanan/sicm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hnarayanan/sicm</a><p>[4] <a href="https://natureofcode.com/" rel="nofollow">https://natureofcode.com/</a>