Oxford Dictionary of Physics

[paulb203]

TL;DR Summary: Any good?

Oxford Dictionary of Physics 8th Edition

Does anyone here have a copy of this? If so, any thoughts on it?

I got the most recent edition recently (8th) which was published in 2019 so it's fairly up-to-date.

It seems ok to me (a novice) for a quick reference guide. I haven’t come across anything yet that contradicts what I’ve come across online. The contributors have several degrees of various levels between them, although it doesn’t state which subject the degrees are in.

It's also a welcome break from reading from the screen of this or that device.

 

[jedishrfu]

I imagine it's suitable for terminology definitions, but you won't be able to learn physics from it.

 

[fresh_42]

I have something similar for mathematics (Atlas for Mathematics) and I don't remember ever using it. I occasionally looked up things in another book (Small Encyclopedia of Mathematics), but more often when I was at school and less ever since. It is so convenient to find things on the internet nowadays, especially lecture notes for entire classes on university servers around the world(!) that it's easier to read one of them and turn to another one if I do not find the answer or representation that I expected to find.

I also remember a discussion here at PF. Someone suggested writing a book about differential equation systems. A kind of list that contains all of them to look up equations, solutions, and context. As I started thinking about it, Lotka-Volterra, SIR, heat equation, Bernoulli principle, Navier-Stokes, Gauss, Maxwell, Einstein, etc. immediately came to mind. However, the second thought was that such an endeavor wouldn't require a single book, but a lexicon of several volumes instead, each of them rather thick, and the third thought was that such a book would likely have to contain the entirety of physics.

The good news is that such books are a great source to browse through, rummage, become curious, and get an appetite for learning more. Get hungry, but eat at the restaurants!

 

[WWGD]

Is it the paper version or the electronic/online one?

 

[Frabjous]

Get hungry, but eat at the restaurants!

Not advice one generally hears.