When Leonard Susskind turned 71 years old in 2011, he had every right to slow down and rest on his laurels. Instead, in the fall of that year he launched an ambitious project of continuing education courses. He explains, “the Stanford area has a lot of people who once wanted to study physics, but life got in the way. They had had all kinds of careers but never forgot their one-time infatuation with the laws of the universe. Now, after a career or two, they wanted to get back into it.” His idea was to make courses and books to satisfy this audience of those with “a rusty but not dead knowledge of calculus, and some experience at solving technical problems.”
These continuing education lectures were videotaped (available online at theoreticalminimum.com), and two have been turned into books. The first book, The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to...
