Modern Classical Physics

What's very slightly smaller than a breadbox, weighs about as much as one of those armored Chevy Suburbans favored by the Secret Service, and packed with most known information about relativity, optics, statistical mechanics, fluid and plasma dynamics, and elasticity?

If you took the hint and guessed Modern Classical Physics: Optics, Fluids, Plasmas, Elasticity, Relativity, and Statistical Physics by Kip S. Thorne and Roger D. Blandford, you would be right.

Yes, my hard copy finally arrived.

Fans of Thorne's previous collaboration in the monster truck textbook category (Gravitation, with Misner and Wheeler) may be heartened to note that MCP shares the same large page format, has nearly 300 more pages, and weighs a lot more, thanks in part to its hardcover format.

The text is based on the course that the authors' taught at Caltech.

As to exactly why this was published as a single volume, rather than three, four or even five normal sized textbooks, I can only speculate, but my favorite is that it is the author's thumb in the eye to the stereotype of the puny and pusillanimous physics major. Pack this and MTW around campus for a while and you will soon have calves and guns like Dwayne Johnson.

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