List of freely available physics books

Question

I'm trying to amass a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular field in physics or about physics in general.

What are some freely available great physics books on the Internet? edit: I'm aware that there are tons of freely available lecture notes online. Still, it'd be nice to be able to know the best available free resources around.

As a starter: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html

---

jump to list sorted by medium / type

---

Table of contents sorted by field (in alphabetical order):

• Chaos Theory
• Earth System Physics
• Mathematical Physics
• Quantum Field Theory

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Comments

I think we should note that we should only include non-copyright-protected material.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Mark C

---

See also freescienceonline.blogspot.com

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

---

@all I posted this in META how-to-organize-a-list-of-free-resources to seek a better organization of this material. The help of all of us, with ideas, could be important. My list is not mine it can be improved by anyone.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Helder Velez

---

I suggest we try putting some order into this post by turning the question into a table of contents (inspired by the meta.SO community FAQ. That will also require grouping the answers, but I think if we work on this together it will soon be worth the effort

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Tobias Kienzler

---

This deserves many up votes, and a meta-answer once thread volume reaches critical mass :)

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Joseph Weissman

---

Some other good places to look are: "How to learn math and physics" by John Baez and StringWiki

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Simon

---

See also the old post by Jacques Distler

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user Simon

Answer 1

Handbook of Quantum Information "an encyclopaedia of everything quantum"

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:39 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 2

Fitzpatrick's The Physics of Plasmas is excellent. He also has notes on Classical Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, and more, but I'm less familiar with these works.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:39 (UCT), posted by SE-user Andrew

Answer 3

Chaos: Classical and Quantum, Cvitanovic´, Artuso, Mainieri, Vattay

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton, translated by Motte

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:38 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 4

Howard Georgi's The Physics of Waves

I wish someone would make the (now mostly out of print) Berkeley Physics Course volumes public domain. Or at least Dover could start cranking out cheap versions.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:39 (UCT), posted by SE-user Anonymous Coward

Answer 5

Making, probing and understanding ultracold Fermi gases

"A review on superfluidity and the BEC-BCS crossover in ultracold Fermi gases."

Wolfgang Ketterle (Nobel 2001), Martin W. Zwierlein

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:39 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 6

The FreeScience website links to a large listing of free books on a wide range of physics, math, and other fields of science.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:40 (UCT), posted by SE-user user2696

Answer 7

Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light second edition

http://ab-initio.mit.edu/book/

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:40 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 8

A nice set of books have been made available through project Gutenberg, are made available through the Open Ebooks Library, including:

Handbook of Formula and Physical constants

Space, Time and Gravitation - An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (beware of this book)

Relativity : the Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:39 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 9

Someone has mentioned the archive.org.

I have found Landau's Course of Theoretical Physics there, without Volumes 4 and 9.

You can also get Feynman's book on Quantum Electrodynamics there.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:40 (UCT), posted by SE-user HPP

Comments

very interesting. legal free online classic books.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:40 (UCT), posted by SE-user pcr

Answer 10

I am a big fan of David Tong's lecture notes on Relativity, Classical Mechanics, QFT, Stat Mech, Soitons, String Theory and Kinetic theory available free.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html

I had learned classical mechanics first time as an undergrad from his notes, and I absolutely fell in love with it. The notes on QFT are also excellent to prep you for things like Peskin & Schroeder.

This post imported from StackExchange Physics at 2014-05-04 15:40 (UCT), posted by SE-user ramanujan_dirac