Physics I For Dummies 3rd Edition
Genres: Physics
Book Preface
Physics is what it’s all about. What what’s all about? Everything. Physics is present in every action around you. And because physics is everywhere, it gets into some tricky places, which means it can be hard to follow. Studying physics 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. What’s vastly different about this physics book is that it’s written from the reader’s point of view.
About This Book
Physics I For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is all about physics from your point of view. We know that most students share one common trait: confusion. As in, “I’m confused about 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, we wrote it from the reader’s point of view. We’ve taken great care to jettison the top-down kinds of explanations instead of the usual book presentation of this topic. 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, this book is designed 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 variables and new terms appear in italics, like this, and that vectors — items that have both a magnitude and a direction — appear in bold. Web addresses appear in monofont.
What You’re Not to Read
We 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 provide 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 made a discovery 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
In writing this book, we made some assumptions about you:
- You have no or very little prior knowledge of physics.
- You have some math prowess. In particular, you know algebra and a little trigonometry. 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.
- You want physics concepts explained clearly and concisely, and you want examples that let you see those concepts in action.
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.
Part 1: Putting Physics into Motion
You usually start your physics journey with motion, because describing motion — including acceleration, velocity, and displacement — isn’t very difficult. You have only a few equations to deal with, and you can get them under your belt in no time at all. Examining motion is a great way to understand how physics works, both in measuring and in predicting what’s going on.
Part 2: May the Forces of Physics Be with You
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Ever heard that one? The law (and its accompanying implications) comes up in this part. Without forces, the motion of objects wouldn’t change at all, which would make for a very boring world. Thanks to Sir Isaac Newton, physics is particularly good at explaining what happens when you apply forces. You also take a look at the motion of fluids.
Part 3: Manifesting the Energy to Work
If you apply a force to an object, moving it around and making it go faster, what are you really doing? You’re doing work, and that work becomes the kinetic energy of that object. Together, work and energy explain a whole lot about the whirling world around you, which is why we dedicate Part 3 to these topics.
Part 4: Laying Down the Laws of Thermodynamics
What happens when you stick your finger in a candle flame and hold it there? You get a burned finger, that’s what. And you complete an experiment in heat transfer, one of the topics you see in Part 4, which is a roundup of thermodynamics — the physics of heat and heat flow. You also see how heat-based engines work, how ice melts, how the ideal gas behaves, and more.
Part 5: The Part of Tens
The Parts of Tens is made up of fast-paced lists of ten items each. You discover all kinds of amazing topics here, like some far-out physics — everything from black holes and the Big Bang to wormholes in space — as well as some famous scientists whose contributions made a big difference in the field.
Icons Used in This Book
You come across some icons that call attention to certain tidbits of information in this book. Here’s what the icons mean:
Beyond the Book
In addition to what you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet for when you need a quick physics refresher on important constants and equations. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and type Physics I For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the search box.
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Read Now | Epub, PDF | August 17, 2022 |
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