Introduction to Physics
Notes on a thirty-eight lecture course by Prof. V. Balakrishnan at IIT Madras, worked through one lecture per week. Each lecture page carries the video link, a summary of the argument, the passages worth keeping, and the full transcript.
Alongside them sits a reference page for the mathematics the lectures assume, and a set of essays on where that mathematics came from — written for someone returning to the subject after a long time away.
02 — Newtonian Mechanics, Degrees of Freedom and Phase Space
Generalized coordinates, constraints, the phase plane, and why trajectories can never cross.
Lectures
The course itself, one page per lecture — summary, quotes, green-board reconstructions and the full transcript.
Essays
Long reads on the foundations: how calculus, probability and statistics were invented, doubted, and in two cases finally made safe.
Background
The mathematics and physics the lectures take for granted, explained from the ground up and added to as the course goes on.
Personal study notes. Summaries written from the lectures; transcripts from the YouTube captions, tidied. Essays and background written by Claude.