LECTURES ON CLASSICAL MECHANICS

This is a very useful collection of the real lectures on classical mechanics taught by John Baez from the Louisiana State University. All lectures that have been included in this publication have been presented in four groups. The first group addresses Newtonian and Lagrangian approaches and give some historical background of the Langrangian approach.

The lectures that are there in the second group address the equations of motion, including the Euler-Lagrange equations, and also provide the correct interpretations of terms. In the third group there are lectures relating to the Noether's and Langrangian theorem, covering the time translation, symmetry and conserved quantities, relativistic particle and electrodynamics, alternative Lagrangians, the principle of the least action and geodesics; the lectures are supplemented with several example problems.

The final group is titled "from Lagrangians to Hamiltonians" and it is dealing with the Hamiltonian approach and equations, Hamilton-Jacobi equations, plus the regular/strongly regular Lagrangians. The classical mechanics itself presents a peculiar area of physics. For many years it as treated as the total of people's theoretical knowledge of the physical universe, but today it is considered an idealization...​