Physics Essentials For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932878
ISBN: 978-1-119-59028-6 (pbk); ISBN: 978-1-119-59034-7 (ePDF); ISBN: 978-1-119-59039-2 (ePub)
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.