review of Susskind and Hrabovsky’s book The Theoretical Minimum

I wasn’t prepared to spend the amount of time with this book that would have been necessary for me to really understand it. I think this is meant to fill a similar niche as Sean Carroll’s (more recent) series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe (review), but with much more focus on how to derive various equations from other equations, and much less conceptual discussion. My biggest takeaway is probably just learning some notation:

• the use of a dot over a symbol to indicate a derivative
• the Levi-Civita symbol which, given three indices, is 1, -1, or 0 depending on whether the indices follow a clockwise or counterclockwise order or neither
• the “del” symbol which I had only known as “nabla”
• Poisson brackets

I would have liked for the book to move slower and provide more concrete examples as it went along.