List of freely available physics books I'm trying to amass a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular field in physics or about physics  in general.
What are some freely available great physics books on the Internet?
edit: I'm aware that there are tons of freely available lecture notes online. Still, it'd be nice to be able to know the best available free resources around.
As a starter:
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html

jump to list sorted by medium / type

Table of contents sorted by field (in alphabetical order):


*

*Chaos Theory

*Earth System Physics

*Mathematical Physics

*Quantum Field Theory
 A: Applications of Classical Physics, Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford
Unpublished so far, this book covers special relativity, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, continuum mechanics, and some general relativity at the graduate level.  I've read about a third of it.  It's well-written and surprisingly-polished for being a freely-available preprint.
Problem sets and solutions are available on the website as well.
A: Sidney Coleman's QFT lecture notes
and videos
A: The art of computational science, Piet Hut and Jun Makino
A computational lab for N-body experiments. Includes books and source code for doing simple N-body simulations. 
A: *

*1951 Lectures on Advanced Quantum Mechanics Second Edition, Freeman J. Dyson

*Introductory Lectures on Quantum Field Theory, Luis Alvarez-Gaume, Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo
A: Earth System Physics
Radiative Transfer in the Earth System, Charlie Zender (All of Zender's books are GNU FDL)
Natural Aerosols in the Climate System, C. Zender
Particle Size Distributions: Theory and Application to Aerosols, Clouds, and Soils, C. Zender
Introduction to Physical Oceanography, Robert Stewart open source, accepting contributions
A: Street-Fighting Mathematics, Sanjoy Mahajan
Short book covering dimensional analysis, estimation, and visualizing mathematics.  The goal is to make mathematics easier and more useful for scientists and engineers, specifically physicists.  (Mahajan is a physicist/educator).  Uses mostly undergrad and high school level math.
A version is available free as a pdf under the creative commons license. 
The paper version is available for purchase from the MIT press.
A: Handbook of Quantum Information "an encyclopaedia of everything quantum"
A: Fitzpatrick's The Physics of Plasmas is excellent. He also has notes on Classical Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, and more, but I'm less familiar with these works.
A: Books
Galileo and Einstein very interesting book, 200 pages, by Michael Fowler , Text for Physics 109, Fall 2009  (from Babylonians and Greeks to Einstein)
Physics Made Easy  Karura notes
Classical and quantum mechanics via Lie algebras  by Arnold Neumaier, Dennis Westra , 502 pages, (arxiv) 
by Hans de Vries: 'Physics Quest' Understanding Relativistic Quantum Field Theory
- I love this  'book in progress' to understand Special Relativity, and beyond. To see how a real Lorentz contraction do happen (ch. 4) and how magnetic field is induced  by electrostactic field and Non-simultaneity (it is like a Coriollis effect)  
by Benjamin Crowell: 'Light and Matter' - General Relativity
  explore other physics topics here http://www.lightandmatter.com/
by Bo Thidé: Electromagnetic Field Theory  - advanced Electrodynamics textbook
Elecromagnetic Fields and Energy MIT Hypermedia Teaching Facility, by Herman A. Haus and James R. Melcher (with media)
HyperPhysics - everything, in short.  
the physics hypertextbook detailed online book, very interesting Work in Progress.  
Relativity - The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1920)
Feynman Lectures (pdfs) (final index) 
Wikipedia Physics a portal to start digging. A colaborative gigantic work. 
WikiBooks -SR a textbook on Relativity. 
WikiSource - Relativity Portal find here "The Measure of Time" by Henri Poincaré and many other original sources.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a plethora of info related to physics (for ex. singularities)
EXPLORING THE BIOFLUIDDYNAMICS OF SWIMMING AND FLIGHT David Lentink
The Physics of Waves by HOWARD GEORGI of Harvard
The Physics of Ocean Waves (for physicists and surfers), by Michael Twardos at UCI
Photonics - The Basics and Applications 92 pages , University of Pennsylvania
Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light 305 pages, Joannopoulos et al, Princeton Univ Press
Computational Genomics  Algorithms in Molecular Biology, Lecture notes by Ron Shamir  (pdfs)
Motion Mountain by Christoph Schiller

Journals open access and online collections
PSE-list-open-access-journals 
Directory of Open Access Journals free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals (6286, been 2735 searchable at article level)  
MathPages  - lectures on various subjects in physics and mathematics.
livingreviews journal  articles by invitaton on relativity and beyond  
livingreviews blog       about the journal articles
Calphysics research on the electromagnetic quantum vacuum  (with care, controversial material)
MIT - OpenCourseWare  Several courses available
MIT OCW fundamentals-of-photonics-quantum-electronics  download pdfs 

Sources to use with precaution
Preprints
ARXIV door to papers that I cannot afford (sometimes good ideas) -- Cornell univ controlled
I follow this archive thru this MIT's blog The Physics arXiv Blog 
VIXRA free to post the ugly, the bad, the crazy, and sometimes good ideas
Independent researchers can publish here. The arXiv is usually closed to authors without academic affiliation.  

Portals
Archive.org Access to a world of original digitized books, and much more.
NASA ADS Absctract Data Service search
Scribd - a generic social publishing site where I find books (scientific/technical) with full or partial access.
scholar.google.com  from the giant that is changing the observable universe of Human beings
Cosmos Portal  from Digital Library
Encyclopedia of Earth  from Digital Library
NanoHub - A resource for nanoscience and technology    

Multimedia
youtube Berkeley Chanel  with courses
Richard Feynman - Science Videos - 4 original videos (recorded at Auckland)  arguably the greatest science lecturer ever.  
Videos for Shiraz's lectures on String Theory 
Leonard Susskind - Modern Theoretical Physics from his "physics for everyone" blog  
Fundamentals of Nanoelectronics NanoHub - Lectures (Purdue Univ ref. ECE 495N)
  including Lecture 10: Shrödinger's Equation in 3-D (mp4)   

Math
Multivariable calculus and vector analysis A set of on-line readings (Interactive click and drag with LiveGraphics3D) ;  explore tab Topics
KhanAcademy (videos)  mission: to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere
Math and physics online tools:
Online Latex Equation Editor (right click the result and apply anywhere)
wolframalpha - computational knowledge engine, do you want to calculate or know about?
sage online  - support a viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB.
Euler Math Toolbox  free software for numerical and for symbolic computations
geogebra     - Free mathematics software for learning and teaching   

Modeling and simulation
OpenModelica Physical modeling and simulation environment
Elmer Open Source Finite Element Software for Multiphysical Problems  (examples)
Mason  Multiagent based simulation   (IA)
ECJ    Evolutionary Computation      (IA)
Breve  A 3d Simulation Environment for Multi-Agent Simulations and Artificial Life 
(IA)
NanoHub-Periodic Potential Lab solves the time independent Schroedinger Equation in a 1-D spatial potential variation
demonstrations.wolfram 7050 applets 

Astronomy and astrophysics
Books and reviews
Cosmology today-A brief review (arxiv 2011)
This is a brief review of the standard model of cosmology. We first introduce the FRW models and their flat solutions for energy fluids playing an important role in the dynamics at different epochs. We then introduce different cosmological lengths and some of their applications. The later part is dedicated to the physical processes and concepts necessary to understand the early and very early Universe and observations of it.
review of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN)  (arxiv 2008)
Portals
astro-canada Introduction to astronomy, light, instruments, etc.  
Data
simbad search data on celestial bodies with the proper tools.
NASA PDS: The Planetary Data System data related to Nasa missions  
Sky viewers
Skyview , Nasa  SkyView is a Virtual Observatory on the Net
WWT World Wide Telescope, Microsoft 
Simulation and presentations
Celestia  free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.
astrolab  presentations_astronomiques (FR)

Other resources
Kirk McDonald page at Princeton.edu a handful of resources on EM,QED,QM (+-5Gb ;-) 
Springerlink's LaTeXsearch you can search articles by using latex formulas input
A: Chaos: Classical and Quantum, Cvitanovic´, Artuso, Mainieri, Vattay 
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton, translated by Motte
A: Howard Georgi's The Physics of Waves
I wish someone would make the (now mostly out of print) Berkeley Physics Course volumes public domain.  Or at least Dover could start cranking out cheap versions.
A: Making, probing and understanding ultracold Fermi gases
"A review on superfluidity and the BEC-BCS crossover in ultracold Fermi gases."
Wolfgang Ketterle (Nobel 2001), Martin W. Zwierlein
A: The FreeScience website links to a large listing of free books on a wide range of physics, math, and other fields of science. 
A: Photonic Crystals:
Molding the Flow of Light
second edition
http://ab-initio.mit.edu/book/
A: A nice set of books have been made available through project Gutenberg, are made available through the Open Ebooks Library, including:
Handbook of Formula and Physical constants
Space, Time and Gravitation - An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (beware of this book)
Relativity : the Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein
A: Quantum field theory
Fields, by W. Siegel
Quantum Field Theory, by Mark Srednicki
Superspace, or One thousand and one lessons in supersymmetry
by S.J. Gates Jr, M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek and W. Siegel
A: Mathematical Tools for Physics, James Nearing
Also available in paperback from Dover.  Undergraduate-level math methods book.  Clear writing, many problems and exercises (usually without solution).  IMHO better than Boas.
A: Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics Sussman, Wisdom, Mayer
A No-Nonsense Introduction to General Relativity, Sean Carroll
A: Quantum Mechanics for Engineers


*

*http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/quantum/
I stumbled across this book the other day when I was looking for a text on nuclear physics. It seems like a handy resource.
To quote the preface:

The book was primarily written for engineering graduate students who find themselves caught up in nano technology. It is a simple fact that the typical engineering education does not provide anywhere close to the amount of physics you will need to make sense out of the literature of your field. You can start from scratch as an undergraduate in the physics department, or you can read this book.

A: Two freely available stellar physics books by George W. Collins II:


*

*The Fundamentals of Stellar Astrophics

*The Virial Theorem in Stellar Astrophysics
A: Someone has mentioned the archive.org.
I have found Landau's Course of Theoretical Physics there, without Volumes 4 and 9.
You can also get Feynman's book on Quantum Electrodynamics there.
A: The OpenStax College Physics text looks promising as a low-level introduction to the subject (algebra-based).
Meanwhile, looking at the other list(s) here, is it really true that Feynman's lectures (and QED) are legally available online for free today? I have serious doubts about that. Has anyone yet made an effort to go through this list and verify the legality (let alone "openness") of the resources linked?
A: I am a big fan of David Tong's lecture notes on Relativity, Classical Mechanics, QFT, Stat Mech, Soitons, String Theory and Kinetic theory available free.
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html
I had learned classical mechanics first time as an undergrad from his notes, and I absolutely fell in love with it. The notes on QFT are also excellent to prep you for things like Peskin & Schroeder. 
A: I would like to recommend my favourite site
http://www.freebookcentre.net/Physics/Physics-Books-Online.html
