Discover Physics

Discover Physics is a conceptual physics textbook intended for students in a nonmathematical one-semester general-education course. (If you're looking for a text for a one-year course of the type normally taken by life-science majors, check out Light and Matter. If you want the type of book used in courses for engineering and physical science majors, see Simple Nature.)

Discover Physics has been adopted at the following schools:

St. Johnsbury Academy
Montana Tech (a class for radiological technicians)
Tarbut V' Torah High School in Irvine, California
Amy Biehl High School, Albuquerque, NM (a combined anatomy and physics class)

The book is free in digital form, and is also available in print, both in color and in an inexpensive black and white edition. If you're a teacher thinking about using Discover Physics in your own course, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Note that the book is designed from the ground up for active learning. It's simply not approrpriate for a lecture-style course. For an example of how to use the book effectively, please take a look at my own syllabus. For more traditional teaching methods, see my book Conceptual Physics.

Legal

The book is (c) 2002-2003 by Benjamin Crowell, and is subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, except for those photographs and drawings of which I am not the author, as listed in the photo credits. You do not have permission to download or copy the book unless you have read the license and agree to it. (At your option, you may also copy this book under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2, with no invariant sections, no front-cover texts, and no back-cover texts.)

Download

Unless you plan on modifying the book or using parts of it in your own projects (as allowed by the license), you probably want it in Adobe Acrobat format. To view and print this format, most people use the free Adobe Reader software, available from Adobe. If you're using Adobe Reader to view and print the book, make sure you have version 4.05 or later. There is a bug in versions 4.0 and earlier which causes some of the figures to be garbled. This is not a problem with other viewers besides Adobe Reader.

Click here to download the book in Adobe Acrobat format (12 Mb, about 60 minutes on a modem). If you're a student who is going to read the book, this is what you want.

The LaTeX source code is here.

What is lightandmatter.com?

This site offers physics textbooks that you can download for free or buy in print. The books have been adopted at 15 colleges and universities, and 15 high schools.

If you're having a hard time finding something, the best place to start is probably the site map.

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