Troup G.J. Mechanics

Longman group, 1976. — 204 p.This book grew out of a series of lectures on mechanics given to first-year science students at Monash University over a number of years. Though the name of only one author appears in the book, many of my colleagues and co-lecturers contributed ideas and treatments of topics over the years. Professor W.A. Rachinger set up an ‘ideal’ syllabus for the course, and with the passage of time some of this was pruned and some topics were added, but the ‘core’ remained. My colecturers have been Dr A.P. Roberts, Mr R. Turner, Dr K. Thompson, and Dr J. Cashion; and Dr H.S. Perlman and Dr L. Francey have often given aid in valuable discussions. One should not forget the students either; on occasions their penetrating questions and location of errors have indeed been helpful. Finally, I should like to thank my hosts, Professor U.M. Palma and Professor I. Cicarello at the Istituto di Fisica dell’ Universita, Palermo, Sicily, where this book was written ‘in santa pace’ during a period of study leave.
I have tried to stress the importance of the Galilean Transformation in Newtonian mechanics; the relation of conservation of quantities to symmetry; and the use of conservation laws to simplify problems. The centre-of-mass frame is also used a good deal. Some of the approaches should remain useful to the reader even when he begins quantum mechanics, and this has been borne in mind in the writing.