Physics: Books

"This text is known for its clear and thorough narrative, as well as its uniquely broad, deep, and thoughtful sets of worked examples that provide students with key tools for developing both conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills."

"'Practice Makes Perfect: Physics' is a comprehensive guide and workbook that covers all the basics of physics that you need to understand this subject. Each chapter focuses on one major topic, with thorough explanations and many illustrative examples, so you can learn at your own pace and really absorb the information. You get to apply your knowledge and practice what you've learned through a variety of exercises, with an answer key for instant feedback."

"The book begins with a review of Newtonian mechanics. It then looks at physical evidence that chemical compounds are made of atoms and shows how basic mechanics and a simple hard-sphere model of atoms explain pressure, temperature, viscosity, and the ideal gas laws, and yield the first determination of the size of an atom. Three chapters of basic electricity and magnetism provide tools used to reveal the electrical nature of atoms, to discover the electron, and to identify it as an important part of all atoms. A description of waves and their properties - particularly interference - provides background for chapters describing how the interactions of light, x-rays, and electrons with crystalline matter and with atoms reveal internal structure. After two chapters unfold the discovery of the particle nature of light and the wave behavior of electrons, the puzzle of wave-particle duality emerges. A chapter on radioactivity, transmutation, the discovery of the nucleus, isotopes, and the neutron and a chapter on Bohr's model of the hydrogen atom and Moseley's identification of the atomic number establish the nuclear model of the atom. The final chapters show how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Feynman's rules of quantum superposition resolve the issues of wave-particle duality at the cost of some uncomfortably unintuitive ideas. These and experiments that confirm them are described in detail."