Talk:Berkeley Physics Course

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Is this course notable ?[edit]

The article currently doesn't show evidence of notability. The relevant guidance is WP:NBOOK (Academic and technical books). DexDor (talk) 07:16, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The 2nd volume, Electricity and Magnetism by Edward M. Purcell, is notable. It uses this approach, and despite being out of print and used copies going for $60 and on up it's still used for MIT's "honors"/more theory and math 2nd term physics course, 8.22. (Note: not the primary text for the later OCW ESG version (ESG is a very special case) but e.g. this blog entry and other search results confirm it's still being used in the regular curriculum version beyond that OCW ESG archived version). That's only MIT, as I remember it's also used in other notable courses at other universities. Hga (talk) 15:44, 1 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A course syllabus and a student blog aren't enough to establish notability or verifiability. I agree that this series has been important to a lot of physics students (I have used some of them myself), but what is there to say about them beyond a listing of the volumes? I have tried a few different searches and found nothing interesting. RockMagnetist (talk) 19:14, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

These books are quite well known and I'd expect there are enough reviews around to establish notability, even if most of them are from 1960's print sources that might be hard to find using search engines. JSTOR quickly turned one up:

   Review: Berkeley Physics Course
   Mechanics: Berkeley Physics Course. vol. 1 by Charles Kittel; Walter D. Knight; Malvin A. Ruderman
   Review by: J. A. Lewis
   Science
   New Series, Vol. 148, No. 3671 (May 7, 1965) , pp. 813-814
   Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science
   Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1716383

50.0.121.102 (talk) 19:24, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for finding this source. I have added it to the article. RockMagnetist (talk) 20:06, 17 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Vol 2 by Purcell was extremely influential, and is still in print 50 years later. These books were an important Sputnik-era event in US physics education. Definitely notable.--75.83.65.81 (talk) 22:35, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've added another reference and some discussion of the historical context and the books' influence. Since it seems that the discussion here and the added references are leaning toward a consensus that the course is notable, I'm going to remove the notability template.--75.83.65.81 (talk) 23:38, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]