ChapterZero

I’ve entered a crucial time in my transition from Houston to California: from now until I reach there, I shouldn’t order any books online. If I got them shipped to Houston, it’s too likely I wouldn’t be around to pick them up, so someone would have to squander money to get them shipped to me; knowing my family, I’d probably also get them months after they arrived (no kidding). I don’t have an address in California to ship them to.

Knowing that I’m in this position makes me more anxious to go online and buy a book, any book. Lately I’ve been adding books to my Amazon.com booklist with an unholy fervor; I even started a new book list to handle fiction (usually I only keep technical books on my wishlist). There are several books that I’d really like to own yesterday: Analytical Mechanics by Fasano and Marmi, and The Geometry of Spacetime by James Callahan come to mind, but I’m stuck deciding which to plunk down the cash for. My next couple of purchases will definitely be physics books– I already have many math books that I’m not going to get around to reading anytime in the next 5 years– but deciding which constitute good starting points is a difficult task. I’m looking for something that starts off with foundational material and slowly builds a respectable edifice; preferably something that develops one or more foundational mathematical tool (e.g. Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, differential geometry, etc.) along the way. The two aforementioned books seem to do a good job covering the classical mechanics and spacetime aspects of physics, but I’d like to have candidates of a similar caliber for quantum mechanics and cosmology.

Possibly relevant posts:

• New books, again (9/7/2007)
• Fluid Mechanics Films (2/17/2008)
• Back in business, different location (9/6/2006)