Andrew's Physics Notes
 Hi there. My name's Andrew. These are my notes. A back story: So the provenance of these notes
dates back to the '90's. Back then, notes were taken with paper + pencils, which was a big step up from the clay tablets + stylus I
was used to. I, along with my peers, marvelled at our newfound ability to quickly transcribe lectures, and to, incredibly, make emendations with erasers.
But it wasn't the ideal medium, as inserting new material, or expounding on it, wasn't practical. That began to change in the 00's when they came out with
them computers. But still it was kind of hard to efficiently and legibly type equations; so I continued to predominantly use paper in grad school.
But finding MathType, finally tipped the scales. So half-way through grad school I started taking notes on the computer. It wasn't long before I could type
equations faster than I could write them. When I got my PhD in 2009, and started teaching, I, like everyone else who has ever taught a course, found myself
discontent with the way it was presented in the book, convinced myself I could do it better, and decided to construct my own lecture notes. It started with the
first classes I taught, namely the Introductory Physics sequence, and then continued with Classical Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics when I taught those courses.
And this is when my project to put more or less all of the physics I had ever ostensibly learned into MS Word began in earnest. So these notes pretty much cover
the gamut of 'basic' Physics: Introductory Physics, Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, Thermodynamics/Statistical
Mechanics, and Condensed Matter. The notes vary in degrees of clarity. Some of them were written with the intent of communicating to an audience, like the ones
for those aforementioned classes. Most were written to myself, as I was (still am really) trying to understand it. When I was a student, I was
often confused as to how all the topics related to each other, and so I was keen to organize these notes in a logical order. This meant putting some topics
together that wouldn't, often for time-constraint reasons, usually be taught together. For one instance, I put a lot of Green's Functions stuff
in the Quantum Mechanics Folder, some in the Stat Mech Folder, and some in the Quantum Field Theory Folder, whereas GF's are usually taught as a separate
course entirely, or just as part of Quantum Field Theory. But since GF's aren't introducing any new physical content per se', and are rather just a mathematical
tool, it seemed more logical to place them (every)where I did.
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