University Physics with Modern Physics (14th edition)

Book Preface

Since its first edition, University Physics has been renowned for its emphasis on fundamental principles and how to apply them. This text is known for its clear and thorough narrative and for its uniquely broad, deep, and thoughtful set of worked examples—key tools for developing both conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills.

The Fourteenth Edition improves the defining features of the text while adding new features influenced by physics education research. A focus on visual learning, new problem types, and pedagogy informed by MasteringPhysics metadata headline the improvements designed to create the best learning resource for today’s physics students.
This book is the product of six and a half decades of leadership and innovation in physics education. When the first edition of University Physics by Franci W. Sears and Mark W. Zemansky was published in 1949, it was revolutionary among calculus-based physics textbooks in its emphasis on the fundamental principles of physics and how to apply them. The success of University Physics with generations of several million students and educators around the world is a testament to the merits of this approach and to the many innovations it has introduced subsequently.

In preparing this new Fourteenth Edition, we have further augmented and developed University Physics to assimilate the best ideas from education research with enhanced problem-solving instruction, pioneering visual and conceptual pedagogy, all-new categories of end-of-chapter problems, and the most pedagogically proven and widely used online homework and tutorial system in the world.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

• All key equations now include annotations that describe the equation and explain the meanings of the symbols in the equation. These annotations help promote in-depth processing of information and greater recall.

• DATA SPEAKS sidebars in each chapter, based on data captured from thousands of students, alert students to the statistically most common mistakes students make when working problems on related topics in MasteringPhysics.

• Updated modern physics content includes sections on quantum measurement (Chapter 40) and quantum entanglement (Chapter 41), as well as recent data on the Higgs boson and cosmic background radiation (Chapter 44).

• Additional bioscience applications appear throughout the text, mostly in the form of marginal photos with explanatory captions, to help students see how physics is connected to many breakthroughs and discoveries in the biosciences.

• The text has been streamlined with tighter and more focused language.

• Based on data from MasteringPhysics, changes to the end-of-chapter content include the following:

• 25%–30% of problems are new or revised.

• Most chapters include six to ten biosciences-related problems.

• The number of context-rich problems is increased to facilitate the greater learning gains that they can offer.

• Three new DATA problems appear in each chapter. These typically contextrich, data-based reasoning problems require students to use experimental evidence, presented in a tabular or graphical format, to formulate conclusions.

• Each chapter now includes three to five new Passage Problems, which follow the format that is used in the MCATs. These problems require students to investigate multiple aspects of a real-life physical situation, typically biological in nature, that is described in a reading passage.

• Looking back at … essential past concepts are listed at the beginning of each chapter, so that students know what they need to have mastered before digging into the current chapter.