Physics Essentials For Dummies E-Book

Steven Holzner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 226

Beschreibung

For students who just need to know the vital concepts of physics, whether as a refresher, for exam prep, or as a reference, Physics Essentials For Dummies is a must-have guide. Free of ramp-up and ancillary material, Physics Essentials For Dummies contains content focused on key topics only. It provides discrete explanations of critical concepts taught in an introductory physics course, from force and motion to momentum and kinetics. This guide is also a perfect reference for parents who need to review critical physics concepts as they help high school students with homework assignments, as well as for adult learners headed back to the classroom who just need a refresher of the core concepts. The Essentials For Dummies Series Dummies is proud to present our new series, The Essentials For Dummies. Now students who are prepping for exams, preparing to study new material, or who just need a refresher can have a concise, easy-to-understand review guide that covers an entire course by concentrating solely on the most important concepts. From algebra and chemistry to grammar and Spanish, our expert authors focus on the skills students most need to succeed in a subject.

Leseprobe

Physics Essentials For Dummies®

Physics Essentials For Dummies®

by Steven Holzner, PhD with Daniel Wohns

Physics Essentials For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925164

ISBN: 978-0-470-61841-7

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

Steven Holzner is an award-winning author of 94 books that have sold over 2 million copies and been translated into 18 languages. He served on the Physics faculty at Cornell University for more than a decade, teaching both Physics 101 and Physics 102. Dr. Holzner received his PhD in physics from Cornell and performed his undergrad work at MIT, where he has also served as a faculty member.

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Introduction

Physics is what it’s all about.

What what’s all about?

Everything. That’s the whole point. Physics is present in every action around you. And because physics has no limits, it gets into some tricky places, which means that it can be hard to follow. It can be even worse when you’re reading some dense textbook that’s hard to follow.

For most people who come into contact with physics, textbooks that land with 1,200-page whumps on desks are their only exposure to this amazingly rich and rewarding field. And what follows are weary struggles as the readers try to scale the awesome bulwarks of the massive tomes. Has no brave soul ever wanted to write a book on physics from the reader’s point of view? Yes, one soul is up to the task, and here I come with such a book.

About This Book

Physics Essentials For Dummies is all about physics from your point of view. I’ve taught physics to many thousands of students at the university level, and from that experience, I know that most students share one common trait: confusion. As in, “I’m confused as to what I did to deserve such torture.”

This book is different. Instead of writing it from the physicist’s or professor’s point of view, I write it from the reader’s point of view.

After thousands of one-on-one tutoring sessions, I know where the usual book presentation of this stuff starts to confuse people, and I’ve taken great care to jettison the top-down kinds of explanations. You don’t survive one-on-one tutoring sessions for long unless you get to know what really makes sense to people — what they want to see from their points of view. In other words, I designed this book to be crammed full of the good stuff — and only the good stuff. You also discover unique ways of looking at problems that professors and teachers use to make figuring out the problems simple.

Conventions Used in This Book

Some books have a dozen conventions that you need to know before you can start. Not this one. Here’s all you need to know:

New terms appear in italic, like this, the first time I discuss them. If you see a word in italic, look for a definition close by.

Physicists use several different measurement systems, or ways of presenting measurements. (See how the italic/definition thing works?) In Chapter 1, I introduce the most common systems and explain that I use the meter-kilogram-second (MKS) system in this book. I suggest that you spend a few minutes with the last section of Chapter 1 so you’re familiar with the measurements you see in all the other chapters.

Vectors — items that have both a magnitude and a direction — appear in bold, like this. However, when I discuss the magnitude of a vector, the variable appears in italic.

Foolish Assumptions

I assume that you have very little knowledge of physics when you start to read this book. Maybe you’re in a high school or first-year college physics course, and you’re struggling to make sense of your textbook and your instructor.

I also assume that you have some math prowess. In particular, you should know some algebra, such as how to move items from one side of an equation to another and how to solve for values. You also need a little knowledge of trigonometry, but not much.

Icons Used in This Book

You come across two icons in the left margins of this book that call attention to certain tidbits of information. Here’s what the icons mean:

This icon marks information to remember, such as an application of a law of physics or a shortcut for a particularly juicy equation.

When you run across this icon, be prepared to find a little extra info designed to help you understand a topic better.

Where to Go from Here

You can leaf through this book; you don’t have to read it from beginning to end. Like other For Dummies books, this one has been designed to let you skip around as you like. This is your book, and physics is your oyster.

You can jump into Chapter 1, which is where all the action starts; you can head to Chapter 2 for a discussion on the necessary vector algebra you should know; or you can jump in anywhere you like if you know exactly what topic you want to study. For a taste of how truly astounding physics can be, you may want to check out Chapter 12, which introduces some of the amazing insights provided to us by Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Chapter 1

Viewing the World through the Lens of Physics

In This Chapter

Recognizing the physics in your world

Getting a handle on motion and energy

Wrapping your head around relativity

Mastering measurements

Physics is the study of your world and the world and universe around you. You may think of physics as a burden — an obligation placed on you in school. But in truth, physics is a study that you undertake naturally from the moment you open your eyes.

Nothing falls beyond the scope of physics; it’s an all-encompassing science. You can study various aspects of the natural world, and, accordingly, you can study different fields in physics: the physics of objects in motion, of forces, of what happens when you start going nearly as fast as the speed of light, and so on. You enjoy the study of all these topics and many more in this book.