Classical Mechanics



I taught this course, but I included way more in the notes than I could ever get to. I broke it up into two parts: Newtonian Mechanics, and Relativistic Mechanics, including Special and General Relativity. I'm no expert on Relativity, so that part's not too detailed. To make sense of General Relativity, and even Special Relativity really, I had to learn a bunch about tensors (all that's in the Tensor file in the Math Appendix below). Couple more comments...I remember doing rotations with Euler angles and such to be very confusing when I was a student. But I think it is much less so, if one treats the dynamics from a vector/tensor point of view - so that's what I did. I included a couple files on fluid dynamics, culminating with the Navier-Stokes equation (reprised from another perspective in the Thermodynamics set). And last, I included a fair amount of Classical Field Theory, as it would've been nice when I took Quantum Field Theory to have had the classical version to compare to.