ChapterZero

Today was a fruitful day, in that I found two books that I’m really excited about. The first, Mechanics by Scheck, is apparently exactly the type of physics book I’ve been looking for: it starts off with Newtonian physics, develops the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations and the whole idea of variational formulations of mechanics, and introduces manifolds and lie groups, etc. Of course, there are many books that purport to cover the same material, but this is the first that I feel is readable for someone who has only seen basic statics and kinetics, a couple of years ago; additionally, it has a reassuringly earthy feel to it. If it measures up to my first impression, this will be the next physics book I buy.

The second is a bit more unusual. I visited the geology library today (for the first time), to find material which might help in designing a landscape evolution system such as the one that I mentioned before. The amount of subjects that revealed themselves as relevant was daunting: structural geology, hydrology, soil mechanics, mineralogy, these are just a few of the geological subdisciplines that you’d need to be familiar with to construct a reasonably representative model of the physical phenomena involved in landscape generation. I wandered around hoping to find an introductory survey book that covered the broad strokes of these areas, but no luck. However, I did run across Fractal River Basins: Chance and Self-Organization, which contains some neat ideas on fractal/network models of river basins. The focus of the book (if I understand it correctly) is more on coming up with models that tell you something useful about the underlying processes, but the illustrations of artificial landscapes generated with some of the models are beautiful. Here’s a book review that appeared in Nature.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Landscape generation (7/9/2007)
• Markov Random Fields, Wavelets, and Terrain Generation (8/20/2005)
• Physical phenomena (10/30/2006)