Understanding Physics

This book, a companion to the textbook, Understanding Physics, is your guide to observations and explorations in the world of physics. Prepare for ch- lenging work, fun, and some surprises. One of the best ways to learn physics is by doing physics, in the laboratory and everywhere. One cannot rely on reading and class work alone. The explorations in this book are your - portunity to gain some actual, hands-on experience with physics. Many of these explorations will assist you to design your own experiments and to discover many of the important ideas of science yourself. As you will see from the Contents, this Student Guide provides a variety of potentially helpful materials. Following the Introduction is a review of units, mathematics, and scientific notation, and a list of suggested further reading and Web Sites. However, a large portion of the Student Guide c- tains further materials relating to many of the textbook chapters, as well as to laboratory explorations. In the section containing “Further Chapter - terials” you will find elaborations on topics in many of the chapters, as well as derivations of important equations. A complete list of the suggested mi- and major-laboratory explorations is also given in the Contents. Each - ploration is keyed to specific portions of the textbook, and lists are also provided of the explorations pertaining to each part of the text.

From the reviews:

"If a book is required which develops the basic concepts of physics in a detailed but completely readable and always interesting way from first principles, then this could certainly be a candidate. It uses the rather outdated historical approach to each chapter’s material, but far from obscuring the important physical results, the approach as used here has been so carefully constructed that one is led to an understanding of the concepts without really noticing that one has arrived!" (Prof. F. W. Bullock, Contemporary Physics, Vol. 44 (6), 2003)

"Understanding Physics is inspired by the famous Project Physics Course ... . The inquiry-based laboratory investigations include in-depth explorations, student-designed inquiries, and text-related mini-laboratory explorations that may be used as hands-on activities or as demonstrations with student participation." (Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, Vol. 84 (1-3), 2003)