What papers should everyone read?

Question

Mathoverflow A single paper everyone should read?

CSTheory What papers should everyone read?

TheoreticalPhysics.SE

What papers should every physicist read?

NOTES:

• One paper per answer.
• Please provide at least a sentence what is inside and why you consider it so worth reading.
• Choose original papers of important basic results rather than large survey papers or "meta" paper suggestion by Gil Kalai

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Comments

Patrik, it is a nice soft question but consider providing the full description in the question (as there is in MO and CSTheory) as _What papers should everyone read?_ without further description is a bit vague IMHO.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

---

Just one publication per answer? Okay, I suppose I get to spam a few answers then.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Answer 1

Chapter 1, volume 3 of the Feynman lectures. It is simply put, the most important article I ever read in my life.

It is required reading not just for physicists, but really any human that wants to learn about the universe.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Answer 2

First a gloss to the way I understand the question : "should everyone read" - I mean that every serious researcher (in theoretical physics) has to refer as to an ultimate resource in searching for truth in natural sciences.

I am aware the fact, that many clever adepts in theoretical physics ignore the following milestones, nevertheless If they hadn't, the landscape of modern (theoretical) physics would have been much more optimistic.

• Astronomia nova - Johannes Kepler (1609)
• Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica - Isaac Newton (1687)
• Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen - Bernhard Riemann (1854)

These papers/books are indispensable, since no one has mentioned them yet and for their incomparable impact on sciences, more words are worthless.

To mention a modern review paper with many interesting references therein I could add :

PDE as a Unified Subject by Sergiu Klainerman.

An essay on partial differential equations written by a leading expert in the field, I strongly recommend to anyone attemping to know more on the subject as well as to those who would like to get a grasp of interactions between Mathematics and Physics.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Answer 3

Anyone starting in physics has probably already purchased this book at their university bookstore, but I recomend it:

Griffiths, David (1987). Introduction to elementary particles (New ed.). New York: Wiley. ISBN 0471603864.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Comments

Is there anything Griffiths didn't write? I'm particularly fond of my Intro to QM of his. The old fashioned hardback one with the gold cat on the front and back. Excellent introductory text. Intro to EM is also excellent.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

---

Griffiths' books are excellent, but I don't think this answer is particularly on topic in this thread.

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)

Answer 4

Thank you for the information. I was just searching for the information on maths as well as physics for my assignments. I am finding it tough to prepare. I also went through the essay review services to find a suitable website for my assignment help. Here I could find many useful information regarding the maths and physics subjects. Hoping to get more information.

Answer 5

Theodor Kaluza Theory of 1919.

"The unifying feature of this theory was that it unified Einstein's theory of gravitation and Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.

As Kaku writes

... this unknown scientist was proposing to combine, in one stroke, the two greatest field theories known to science, Maxwell's and Einstein's, by mixing them in the fifth dimension."

I fly all the way to Berlin, just for a copy. LOOPS '05

This post has been migrated from (A51.SE)