A New Physics Textbook

Sometimes you get what you pay for, and sometimes the best things in life are truly free.  This one is free. 

It's the Motion Mountain Physics Textbook, and it's free in pdf form.  Better yet, the pdf is text searchable and referenced.

It's a work in progress, not yet finished, but over 1400 pages thus far:

The text is written for self-study. It tells a story; it is not a commented formula collection. In its teaching approach, the project tries to satisfy several needs. First of all, the explanations are written in a way that should appeal both to people who prefer thinking in images and to those that prefer thinking in words. Furthermore, the content has been selected to attract both male and female readers. Next, the text is written to appeal to composer and to competitor characters. The text also tries to cater both for the experimentally and the theoretically inclined. Finally, the story should appeal to those who like the natural sciences and to those who like the humanities.

An excerpt:

Astonishingly, it is actually impossible to distinguish an original picture of nature from its mirror image if it does not contain any human traces. In other words, everyday nature is somehow left-right symmetric. This observation is so common that all candidate exceptions, from the jaw movement of ruminating cows to the helical growth of plants, such as hops, or the spiral direction of snail shells, have been extensively studied. Can you name a few more? The left-right symmetry of nature appears because everyday nature is described by gravitation and, as we will see, by electromagnetism. Both interactions share an important property: substituting all coordinates in their equations by the negative of their values leaves the equations unchanged. This means that for any solution of these equations, i.e., for any naturally occurring system, a mirror image is a possibility that can also occur naturally. Everyday nature thus cannot distinguish between right and left. Indeed, there are right and left handers, people with their heart on the left and others with their heart on the right side, etc.

I think it looks brilliant.  I've downloaded it and am asking Medium and Large to both put it on their computers as well.  The perfect reference, with or without the internet.

Do all objects on Earth fall with the same acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, assuming that air resistance can be neglected? No; every housekeeper knows that. You can check this by yourself. A broom angled at around 35 degrees hits the floor before a stone, as the sounds of impact confirm. Are you able to explain why?

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Comments

[a rose is a rose]

wow, how cool is that? what a find rick!