The Physics of Vibrations and Waves [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

In a book wrought with errors, vagueness, tortuous notation, almost no examples, and very little use as a reference book, I can't imagine why any professor or student would want to pick this book up, expensive at it is, let alone assign it for a class. The topics are presented incompletely, jumping around from subtopic to subtopic without ever defining concepts, showing good techniques for applying physical intuition and mathematical reasoning, or fully exploring some of the mathematics involved. Where mathematical rigor would be desirable for pedagogy, none is applied. Where a demonstrative example would be useful, none is given. Where even a small one sentence definition would have been useful, nothing is there. The example questions are simply horrendous; all of them are "show/prove that ..." in structure, with half being of the "plug in numbers" type that gives no understanding, and the other being of the "derive this equation" type in a part of the book where understanding and derivation has been deemphasized in order to introduce new, undefined vocabulary words and constants. Not to mention, the vast number of errors in the problems makes it all the harder to obtain any understanding at all. All in all, a fairly horrendous book; it's hard to understand why it has become so popular or even reached the sixth edition at all.

I am a math and physics student, and I was in two courses where this book was the "official" text. In the first course, the professor was very hopeful at the beginning of the semester. As we progressed through the course, it became apparent that many of the problems were incorrectly formulated, leading to impossible, nonsensical, answers, or to none at all.

In the second course, the professor---a top researcher who wrote his PhD thesis under Dr. Steven Weinberg---told us on the first day, "The book is posted as the official class text, but you can sell it back right now. If I use any problems from this book, I'll make copies for you." The professor taught from his personally created notes for the course, which were excellent.

From the perspective of an average undergraduate physics or engineering major who is taking his or her first transition-into-upper-level-physics class, this book by H.J. Pain is an overwhelming, confusing sludge of unclear derivations, incorrect problems, and a whimsical ordering of material. The problems are often challenging---but you cannot solve the majority of them after reading the corresponding chapter. Furthermore, many of the problems are errorenous, lead to physically improbable, or even impossible, results, sometimes with incorrect units for the desired quantities. I posit that the only reason someone should own this book is to be able to copy down the assigned problem from class.

Looking at the text right now, I think I could learn---or have learned already!---how NOT to present the material. Much of the material is more suitable for an upper-division optics class. For example, the very first chapter, which begins talking about specific mechanical oscillators with no introduction to the material, later makes a terrifying jump cut to "Superposition of Several Waves" and "Polarization of Light". Much of the later material is haphazardly ordered, and some of it is even from upper-level or graduate courses on condensed matter!

This brings me to another major fault: the author provides very little, or zero motivation for the physics discussion. This accompanies great leaps of faith in the derivations, as well as seeming mathematical "miracles", leaving the freshman or early-sophomore (1st year and 2nd year, respectively, for those of you overseas) behind in the mathematical dust.

Not only does the author make transitions that are difficult-to-follow, he seems to taunt his readers with confidence-crumbling "obviously"s, "it should be clear to the reader that", and other such phrases, instead of, perhaps, parenthetically justifying the next step (e.g. "by conservation of momentum", or "subsituting from Eq. 6.2 and dividing both sides by common terms,"). Looking back, I can see how to tie the material together, but that knowledge comes from optics and modern physics courses I've taken, as well as background reading.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, The UT physics department has DONE AWAY WITH this book and has gone back to the Berkeley Waves course:
http://www.amazon.com/Waves-Berkeley-Physics-Course-WAVES/dp/0070048606

And the MIT Vibrations and Waves book by A.P. French:
http://www.amazon.com/Vibrations-Waves-M-I-T-Introductory-Physics/dp/0393099369

Some professors also use Hecht's "Optics":
http://www.amazon.com/Optics-4th-Eugene-Hecht/dp/0805385665/

I sincerely hope you enjoy your study of waves and find the resources you need.

This book is utterly useless! Pain (an appropriate last name for the author of this book) gives little to no explanation for what he does in this book which leaves the reader confused as to what he is trying to show. The few explanations he does provide are often written in a convoluted manner and do not convey the material at all. The book is also extremely inconsistent. It assumes that you have no previous experience with partial derivatives, differential equations or complex numbers yet at the same time gives you problems that require extensive knowledge of many different areas of physics at the graduate level. As a sophomore undergraduate, I found this extremely annoying. The book is also filled with errors in the equations, text and problems that can lead to unnecessary confusion. It almost seems that Pain tried to make this textbook as horrible as possible.

Hopefully, if you have to use this book for a class, you will have a decent professor is who is able to pick up Pain's slack. If you are as unlucky as me and have a horrible professor while using this book, then I suggest buying French's MIT series Waves and Vibrations book. It is written much better. Another suggestion is to watch the video lectures on MIT's Open Courseware for a similar class taught at MIT. The class is called Physics III: Waves and Vibrations with a course number of 8.03. The lectures are extremely helpful and are completely free :). The lectures can be found via the MIT website and they are also availabe on YouTube. My ultimate advice for this book is to avoid it if possible.