January 3, 2026
From Freshman to Feynman: Choose Your Fighter
Ask HN: Expository/Succinct Books on Modern Physics
Textbook smackdown: starter books praised while Penrose’s math marathon scares and thrills
TLDR: Crowdsourced book picks split the room: beginners flock to friendly textbooks, while veterans insist Penrose and Landau demand serious math. The thread’s core debate is comfort versus rigor, with jokes about “382 pages of math first” underscoring a hard truth—modern physics is learnable, but only if you embrace the math.
The Hacker News crowd went full book-club-battle over how to learn “modern physics” (think quantum weirdness and space-time stuff). One loud camp swears by freshman-friendly textbooks: University Physics, Fundamentals of Physics, and Krane’s Modern Physics. OgsyedIE cheers Young & Freedman as “the best introduction to a little bit of everything,” while timthorn tosses in a curveball with Felder & Felder’s Modern Physics and a hearty “second” for the classics. The vibe: start simple, build confidence, and don’t panic.
Then the math purists kicked down the door. QuadmasterXLII hoisted Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality like a boss battle, warning the “first 382 pages are just math” before the physics even starts. Senorcrab went full reality check: “Modern physics requires rigorous mathematics.” Cue gasps, memes, and a few “382 pages of foreplay” jokes. Landau’s legendary Course of Theoretical Physics was treated like the final level—elite, brutal, and respected—while Nakahara’s Geometry, Topology and Physics got name-dropped as the math-on-ramp for the brave. A nostalgic aside from vittore—loving an old Ivanov text in Russian—gave the thread some warm fuzzies.
Strongest take: you can start approachable, but sooner or later the math monster shows up. The drama: optimism vs. rigor, comfort reads vs. gladiator training. Internet verdict: pick your pain, pack snacks, and don’t skip the math notes.
Key Points
- •Lists popular freshman-level physics textbooks: University Physics (Young & Freedman), Fundamentals of Physics (Halliday, Resnick, Walker), and Modern Physics (Krane).
- •States that modern physics requires rigorous mathematics and goes beyond freshman textbooks.
- •Recommends The Road to Reality (Roger Penrose) for a nonrigorous introduction/overview.
- •Recommends Course of Theoretical Physics (Landau) for comprehensive, high-level study, noting its difficulty.
- •Suggests Geometry, Topology, and Physics (Nakahara) to learn topology in a physics context, nonrigorously.