Classical Physics#
Prof. V. Balakrishnan’s lecture series on classical physics, followed here as a set of worked lecture notes rather than a bare syllabus. Each lecture reconstructs the argument from the video series, with the phase-space pictures made explicit and interactive wherever the lecture itself asks you to “draw” or “complete” one.
Lectures#
Lecture 2 — Degrees of Freedom, Newton’s Equations, and Phase Space
Lecture 3–4 — Multiple Critical Points, Scaling Arguments, and the Road to Linear Systems
Lecture 7 — The Lagrangian Formalism: Action, Euler–Lagrange Equations, and the Pendulum
Lecture 10–12 — Hamiltonian Dynamics: Legendre Transforms, Poisson Brackets, and Integrability
Lecture 13–14 — Dynamical Symmetry: Noether’s Theorem, the Symplectic Group, and the Kepler Problem
Lecture 20–21 — Foundations of Statistical Mechanics: Equal A Priori Probabilities and the Law of Large Numbers (skips ahead in the syllabus — see below)
Lecture 22–23 — The Microcanonical Ensemble and the Structure of Thermodynamics
Lecture 24–25 — The Canonical Ensemble and the Classical Ideal Gas
Lecture 28–30 — Phase Transitions, Critical Phenomena, and Landau Theory (skips ahead in the syllabus — see below)
Lecture 35–38 — Special Relativity: Noether’s Theorem, Four-Vectors, and the Lorentz Group (the final lecture of the course)
Upcoming Topics#
Balakrishnan’s course runs from mechanics through statistical mechanics before reaching phase transitions and finally special relativity; the following isn’t transcribed here yet:
Classical field theory
Oscillations and normal modes
Lecture 15–19 (between dynamical symmetry and statistical mechanics — the syllabus skips ahead at Lecture 20)
Further probability distributions (Lec-26–27, beyond the binomial/Poisson/Gaussian covered in Lecture 20–21)
Critical phenomena and the group theory of Noether’s theorem (Lec-31–34, between Lecture 28–30 and Lecture 35–38)