Syntopic reading is one of the techniques outlined in the PhotoReading book, and treated in the seminar, that allows you to PhotoRead and activate numerous books in a given subject. Esoteric is usually the hidden, unusual, difficult, or "magical" aspect of a subject.
Concerning Hamiltonians and Lagrangians - rather than looking at the forces at play in a system (e.g., a simple pendulum), where you would break the forces into components and, perhaps, redefine your coordinate system, you instead look at the differences between the potential and kinetic energies and use a "minimization principle" to obtain your equations of motion. Most junior-senior level physics texts (e.g., Marion's _Classical Dynamics_ or Landau and Lif****z's _Classical Mechanics_) will treat Hamiltonians and Lagrangians at length. Their real power comes in when studying quantum mechanics, where you don't deal with forces at all but differences in energy.
quote:
Originally posted by jmbreland:
ckerins, your reply sounds very interesting, but I can't understand fully what you said unless I know what "syntopically" and "esoteric" means. What are Hamiltonians and Lagrangians?Yeah, I completely agree that visualization is one of the most powerful tools physicists has at their disposal. Myself, I rely heavily on visualization to understand physics. I find it easy to understand linear physics, but rotational physics, oh boy. It's difficult to visualize rotational physics without letting linear physics impose (the tangential quantities).
