Preface

Summary

Among the first courses taken by graduate students in physics in North America is Classical Mechanics. This book is a contemporary text for such a course, containing material traditionally found in the classical textbooks written through the early 1970s as well as recent developments that have transformed classical mechanics to a subject of significant contemporary research. It is an attempt to merge the traditional and the modern in one coherent presentation.

When we started writing the book we planned merely to update the classical book by Saletan and Cromer (1971) (SC) by adding more modern topics, mostly by emphasizing differential geometric and nonlinear dynamical methods. But that book was written when the frontier was largely quantum field theory, and the frontier has changed and is now moving in many different directions. Moreover, classical mechanics occupies a different position in contemporary physics than it did when SC was written. Thus this book is not merely an update of SC. Every page has been written anew and the book now includes many new topics that were not even in existence when SC was written. (Nevertheless, traces of SC remain and are evident in the frequent references to it.)

From the late seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, classical mechanics was one of the main driving forces in the development of physics, interacting strongly with developments in mathematics, both by borrowing and lending. The topics developed by its main protagonists, Newton, Lagrange, Euler, Hamilton, and Jacobi among others, form the basis of the traditional material.