Physics Essentials For Dummies

Book 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 expo-sure to this amazingly rich and rewarding field. And what fol-lows 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 expla-nations. 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.