Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good text, once the best., 24 Jul 1998
By A Customer
Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" appeared at the right time. The development of quantum mechanics demanded familiarity with methods of advanced mechanics that no student of physics had been introduced to. Dirac told in a semminar that he didn't know what a Poisson bracket was, when he was constructing his version ot quantum mechanics (where Poisson brackets play a fundamental role). Heisenberg didn't know matrices, in similar circumstances. Max Born did know these things, and actually wrote a superb book on mechanics using them, but it was in German, at an advanced level and called Mechanics of the Atom. The book then available in English was the formidable Whittaker "Analytical Dynamics", whose exercises took sometimes a whole page just to be stated! In this panorama, in the fifties, Addison-Wesley published the beautifully produced Goldstein. It was an instant sensation. In the introduction the author candidly confessed that, in his opinion, a cou! rse in mechanics justified itself only as a preparation for quantum mechanics, and that was clearly the slant of the book. It was extremely well written, except for a disastrous chapter on the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. The exercises were not at the level of the text: you found much better ones in Slater, Frank's "Mechanics", for instance. The references were excellent, commented, and gave the reader a sense of perspective (and of awe, in the company of men like Riemann, Born, Weber...). I loved the book and hated the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Later on the slim book by Landau, Lifshitz, "Mechanics", entered the scene and showed that Goldstein's program could be made better, briefer, and that the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, clearly and sensibly derived, was the jewel of the crown. Not only, in the subsequent volumes of their Theoretical Physics course, they showed how invaluable this Hamilton-Jacobi was, by applying it with great skill in all kinds of problems.! Then, finally, it became clear that mechanics was not dead! : the whole affair of stability, chaos, etc, exploded, and it became impossible to consider mechanics just as a ladder to quantum mechanics. So, even the philosophy of the venerable Goldstein had to be forgotten. Still, Goldstein's Classical Mechanics is alive, possibly now more Classical than Mechanics.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A solid book, 8 Jan 1999
By A Customer
This is probably the best treatment of Classical Mechanics I've ever read, though, as with anything, it could use some improvement. My only gripe is the usual one with texts like this: There are few if any specific physical instances of formulations that so often serve as a watershed of understanding in physics. For example, in the derivation of the Langrangian, and finally the Hamiltonian, no point for point physical example (say, with a central force like gravity) is offered. It would be nice to see a step by step description of how the Riemann sum over time of the difference in kinetic and potential energies changes as different paths are chosen. I did this and it was beautiful and incredibly enlightening. Once you can _see_ that kind of behavior, you're powerful! It is then easy to generalize to any abstract system. But all else was excellent. If you really want to learn Mechanics, you must start with Goldstein. Recommended preliminaries: Stewart's Calculus; Schaum's Linear Algebra; Halliday, Resnick and Walker's Fundamentals of Physics and Symon's Mechanics.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good book if a little dated, 5 April 1998
By A Customer
There are more books on classical mechanics than there are students of the subject. Goldsteins book is one that just seems to of been around forever.Even though this was written in 1980 he has deliberatley avoided the 'modern' developments such as Abraham and Marsden and the towering genius of 20th century mechanics Arnold. This is no place for diffeomorphisms or invariant tori. Perhaps these days the best use for a book like Goldstein is to have it along side A&M to translate from the old language to the new and vice versa. At the end of each chapter there is a guide to other texts on the same or related topics. Very well written and very amusing.
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