Why a New Physics Textbook?

We Americans assume that our economic system will always scamper to provide us with the products we want. Special orders don't upset us! I want my MTV! The truth is more complicated, especially in our education system, which is paid for by the students but controlled by the professoriate. Witness the perverse success of the bloated science textbook. The newspapers continue to compare our system unfavorably to Japanese and European education, where depth is emphasized over breadth, but we can't seem to create a physics textbook that covers a manageable number of topics and gives honest explanations of everything it touches on.
The publishers try to please everybody by including every imaginable topic, but end up pleasing nobody. There is wide agreement among physics teachers that the traditional introductory textbooks cannot in fact be taught in the time alotted. One cannot surgically remove enough material and still gracefully navigate the rest of one of these kitchen-sink textbooks. What is far worse is that the books are so crammed with topics that nearly all the explanation is cut out in order to keep the page count below 1100. Vital concepts like energy are introduced abruptly with an equation, like a first-date kiss that comes before "hello."

Changing Economics

There's nothing new about the economic forces behind the kitchen-sink textbook, but what is new is the recent unreasonable rise in textbook prices: $132 for Fundamentals of Physics, and $96 for Conceptual Physics, a book meant to be used for only one semester! Along with the rise in prices has come an increasing trend toward greedy and manipulative behavior. New editions, with only trivial changes, are cranked out as frequently as possible in order to kill off the used book market. Our school's bookstore recently found out that the latest edition of Hewitt would no longer be available except as a shrinkwrapped package, which meant that students would't be able to return the book if they dropped the course.

In the midst of all this change, digital publishing is the new wildcard. The books here on this site are all available for free, so students can print out their own copies. Six of the eight books, comprising the Light and Matter series for one-year introductory courses, are also available in print, at prices not much higher than the cost of laser printing. Although my books are written for college courses, I've also been gratified to see that they've been adopted by several high schools --- if anything, the increase in book prices have hit the public schools harder than they've hit colleges.

Learning to Hate Physics?

When you read a mystery novel, you know in advance what structure to expect: a crime, some detective work, and finally the unmasking of the evildoer. Likewise when Charlie Parker plays a blues, your ear expects to hear certain landmarks of the form regardless of how wild some of his notes are. But surveys of physics students usually show that they have worse attitudes about the subject after instruction than before, and their comments often boil down to a complaint that the person who strung the topics together had not learned what Agatha Christie and Charlie Parker knew intuitively about form and structure: students become bored and demoralized because the "march through the topics" lacks a coherent story line.

The Light and Matter series of introductory physics textbooks, as implied by its title, has a story line built around light and matter. The outlines of Discover Physics and Simple Nature are based on conservation laws.

For information about the idea of free and/or open-source textbooks, see this article.

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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