>>14421652>jackson can go fuck itself - it's remarkable how little of it is actually applicable in real researchThis statement is so laughably out of touch it's remarkable.
First off, no elementary text is going to help with research-level questions beyond providing what wikipedia already can (i.e., reminders of little details in some definitions or the name of a result).
Second, Jackson does a fantastic job at instilling into students the conceptual core of physics - namely, knowing when to make the appropriate approximation. Of course other texts and other subjects do this as well - the entire transition from stat mech to thermo is predicated on this - but in my experience, Jackson really hammers it home. I think the reason is that people look at how "beautiful" Maxwell's equations are and think that such a neat, "elegant" theory should be solved fully analytically, probably with some glamorous use of Bessel functions or whatever. And they think this generally of physics too; after all, it's how all their undergrad courses have gone.
But the fact of the matter is that almost no physical system of any interest can be solved exactly like that. Physics isn't some unraveling of the "source code of the universe" or whatever bullshit popsci is spouting these days - physics is an endeavor of model building to fit data. And sometimes even those models are too complex to solve, so you simplify with further approximations. Such approximations are necessary, and also good enough to accurately predict the real world, which is all that we need at the end of the day. This is what Jackson teaches us.
