Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Hi, can you guide me which books should i follow for which topic to prepare for gre exam?

For Mechanics : ? - I have read Halliday Resnick,
Electromagnetism:? - same
Quantam: ? Schaum Series?
and so on about other topics?

What do you say about these books " 3000 solved problems in physics" and " how to solve phyiscs problems" . How much these books can help for GRE?

Please help me. My target is 770 - 800 .

But you tell about how can i get the best result? I will do hard work.

Halliday for mechanics and E&M should be sufficient. Everything else you can get in a good Modern Physics book; Tipler is a decent choice.

will wrote:Halliday for mechanics and E&M should be sufficient. Everything else you can get in a good Modern Physics book; Tipler is a decent choice.

Thanks a lot but which book are you talking about for modern physics? "modern physics" for Paul A. Tipler and Ralph Llewellyn ? Is it all?

So halliday resnick and Tipler ? Thats all to climb over 750?

SuperStringBoy wrote:

will wrote:Halliday for mechanics and E&M should be sufficient. Everything else you can get in a good Modern Physics book; Tipler is a decent choice.

Thanks a lot but which book are you talking about for modern physics? "modern physics" for Paul A. Tipler and Ralph Llewellyn ? Is it all?

So halliday resnick and Tipler ? Thats all to climb over 750?

ud u not want to study Griffiths for quantum too? I ultimately did not take the pGRE, but this is one of the standard quantum books.

From my experience, I knew enough to answer almost all of the quantum mechanics questions just from what I learned in modern physics, a sophomore level class. There were a couple of more advanced questions that involved perturbation theory and such, but one could easily disregard those questions and still get a great score.

Which books you need to study for the GRE assuredly depend upon what physics you already know confidently, and what you need perhaps for the first time. What's your background? Are there any upper level core classes you've missed (E&M, mechanics, stat mech, quantum)?

Beiser's "Concepts of Modern Physics" is great for a lot of things that show up on the test (basic QM, atomic, relativity, even positronium and a lot more).

I agree, I used Beiser. I didn't even glance at Griffith's when reviewing for the exam (I took quantum my junior year, and the pgre fall of my senior year). I actually found the quantum mechanics questions on the pgre to be the easiest of any subject. As long as you are familiar with the concept of wavefunctions, and how to find expectation values when given some linear combination of eigenstates, then you can probably answer most of the quantum questions.

Actually, the one thing I did review from my quantum course was not in griffiths, but form a handbook my professor wrote, that had some useful identities for commutators. They were useful for some of the problems on the practice tests, but I can't remember if they were on the real one.

I am in second year. After few months i hope to be at third yr. I am student of physics major. So I will be reading Griffiths next yr. Thank you. I also have Baiser's Concept of Modern Physics.

I think schaum's outline for modern physics should also help. Right? or not?

I used Halliday and Resnick for most of it. It's a comprehensive intro to physics book that I use for tutoring, and surprisingly, almost everything I saw on the GRE's was covered in that book. This includes thermo, optics, em and intro to physics. Quantum is another story. I think your best bet is to really slam home the general physics concepts, then take any "tidbits" from other classes that you think are important (for example, knowing about entropy of an ideal gas from thermo is a good idea...). For quantum/nuclear, the best you can do is just understand previous exams. Stanford's physics club has 4 practice exams posted if you can't git them all here.