Why do some authors make their books so impossibly hard and excruciatingly

Are you an arts or humanities student, by any chance?
You sound an awful lot like one.

>>8560034
Physics actually.

Though by the sound of your pretentious tone you sound like an asshole so it doesn't matter.

>>8560032
Because sometimes the material is actually difficult and you gotta sit down and work through it in order to really learn

>>8560036
Oh you must be one of those engineering types right

>>8560032
After you know something it's trivial(to you). That's most of it. Also difficult material makes for hard reading. Try looking at something like Lusztig's "Intro" to quantum groups. He knows that he's writing for other researchers, not undergrads. If an undergrad tries to learn from it, and fails, it's not really the author's fault, it's the reader's.

File: The_Road_to_Reality.jpg (19KB, 420x617px) Image search: [Google]

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This one. But it's still good IF you can understand any of it.

>>8560484
understand what? it doesn't say shit

>>8560032
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm-4PltMB2A

Dunno what you expect OP, yeah the book is a bit rough and technical, but it's not meant to be some undergrad intro book.

I actually love the Jackson, it's amazingly complete and perfectly rigorous. But it is not at all an introduction book...

It is actually very difficult (not to say impossible) to be both clear and simple, and exact.
This is why there is introduction books for teaching purpose, wich gives you a good idea of the physics but don't aims at answering everything perfectly, and more academic texts for accomplished physicist who want a formal and exact answer to their weird questions.

You find the same thing in every field : when you first start learning C, you'll want a readable with-the-hands tutorial.
After a few year, when your not quite sure about the syntax of a given function, you'll just want a clean prototype, and the man page will seem perfectly clear to you. I wouldn't recommand discovering programming with it, though.

Finally, Jackson really ain't that bad... read Landau and feel the pain! And those book where designed for undergrad students... (but russian, so...!).

>Or is it just a case of "hurrr social darwinism! hurrr the strong should trample the weak!" kind of mentality?
Social darwinism is a double edged sword, if the book is too complicated, nobody buys it.

>>8560943
>nobody buys it

No, students are forced to buy it if the professor's course entirely depends on it or the professors are forced to buy it from the publishers under whatever arrangement the university has with them.

Doesn't matter if its a shit book or not. The author / publisher is guaranteed to get paid in academia.

>>8560487
It only walks you through most topics in modern physics...

sometimes you need to suffer to achieve great things.
or you can buy Griffiths book, and the brainlet certificate it comes with
Jackson is hard, but it is the last book you'll ever need

>>8560032
Study this alongside with Griffiths. You'll be fine.

>>8560925
Indeed. The great thing about books like Jackson's is that it will last you quite a while. Whether you're a grad student or already doing your 8th postdoc, that book is still a great reference.

>>8560032
When you've spent decades on a single subject, it becomes impossible to relate to people that don't understand it. I've had lecturers like this. They'd explain things in a way that they obviously though was clear, but then would get really confused, and sometimes a little fustrated when people the class wouldn't understand. And usually, it would be due to him missing out a small 'trivial' detail thats key to understanding the concept. But it wouldnt even occur to him that this would need explaining, because to him it so obvious.

I always thought that one day i'd like to write my own, colour coded textbook, with differant colours representing the depth you want to go into. So for example, you could read the whole book in the blue section and it would just give you the subject in brief and give you the jist of it all. No maths at all. Then if you wanted to find out more about it, or want to re-read it but gain a stronger understanding, you could drop down and read the red section too which would provide a bit more detail. Then possibley another couple of colours, all representing the level of depth you want to go into. Would this work or would it just make everything more confusing?

>>8560032
I was told a lot of my papers are very hard to read and I can understand why since even I have trouble with them when I go back to read them, but it's the best I can do.

>>8561088
>Would this work or would it just make everything more confusing?
it sounds great in theory, but would probably be very difficult to do in practice
the only way to find out is to try though

>>8560487
>Being this fucking retarded
Also, obv troll

>>8560487
It is an infuriating book. He just waffles around topics. Nothing is clearly defined e.g. 'holomorphic'.

If you already know the topic it is kind of interesting. In this regard it is a bit like the Feynman lectures, though the Feynman lectures are far better for their time. Only a few of Feynman's students could follow the lectures, and they were probably those who had studied ahead.

Also Penrose is a liar. He claimed he had answers to the problems on the web and he did not.

>>8560104
>Run away before people start throwing things

What did he mean by this?