Physics For Dummies
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2006 PREFACE
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 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. All you need to know is that new terms appear in italics, like this, the first time I discuss them and that vectors — items that have both a magnitude and a direction — appear in bold in Chapter 4, like this.
What You’re Not to Read
I provide two elements in this book that you don’t have to read at all if you’re not interested in the inner workings of physics — sidebars and paragraphs marked with a Technical Stuff icon.
Sidebars are there to give you a little more insight into what’s going on with a particular topic. They give you a little more of the story, such as how some famous physicist did what he did or an unexpected real-life application of the point under discussion. You can skip these sidebars, if you like, without missing any essential physics.
The Technical Stuff material gives you technical insights into a topic, but you don’t miss any information that you need to do a problem. Your guided tour of the world of physics won’t suffer at all.
Foolish Assumptions
I assume that you have no knowledge of physics when you start to read this book. However, you should have some math prowess. In particular, you should know some algebra. You don’t need to be an algebra pro, but you should know how to move items from one side of an equation to another and how to solve for values. Take a look at Chapter 2 if you want more information on this topic. You also need a little knowledge of trigonometry, but not much. Again, take a look at Chapter 2, where I review all the trig you need to know — a grasp of sines and cosines — in full.
How This Book Is Organized
The natural world is, well, big. And to handle it, physics breaks the world down into different parts. The following sections present the various parts you see in this book.
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CONTENTS
Part I: Putting Physics into Motion
1. Using Physics to Understand Your World
2. Understanding Physics Fundamentals
3. Exploring the Need for Speed
4. Following Directions: Which Way Are You Going?
Part II: May the Forces of Physics Be with You
5. When Push Comes to Shove: Force
6. What a Drag: Inclined Planes and Friction
7. Circling around Circular Motions and Orbits
Part III: Manifesting the Energy to Work
8. Getting Some Work out of Physics
9. Putting Objects in Motion: Momentum and Impulse
10. Winding Up with Angular Kinetics
11. Round and Round with Rotational Dynamics
12. Springs-n-Things: Simple Harmonic Motion
Part IV: Laying Down the Laws of Thermodynamics
13. Turning Up the Heat with Thermodynamics
14. Here, Take My Coat: Heat Transfer in Solids and Gases
15. When Heat and Work Collide: The Laws of Thermodynamics
Part V: Getting a Charge out of Electricity and Magnetism
16. Zapping Away with Static Electricity
17. Giving Electrons a Push with Circuits
18. Magnetism: More than Attraction
19. Keeping the Current Going with Voltage
20. Shedding Some Light on Mirrors and Lenses
Part VI: The Part of Tens
21. Ten Amazing Insights on Relativity
22. Ten Wild Physics Theories