A Physics Formulary

 Author: J.C.A. Wevers

 Publisher: Samizdat Press

 Content URL: Link To Content

An overview of physics in 100 pages. Mechanics, electricity and magnetism, relativity, oscillations, waves, optics, statistical physics, thermodynamics, transport phenomena, quantum mechanics, plasma physics, solid state physics, group theory, nuclear physics, quantum field theory and particle physics, and astrophysics.

Essential Physics I

 Authors: Frank W. K. Firk , Yale University

 Year: 2000

 Content URL: Link To Content

Essential Physics 1, is an intensive introduction to classical and special relativity, Newtonian dynamics and gravitation, Einsteinian dynamics and gravitation, and wave motion. Mathematical methods are discussed, as needed; they include: elements of differential geometry, linear operators and matrices, ordinary differential equations, calculus of variations, orthogonal functions and Fourier series, and non-linear equations for chaotic systems. The contents of this book can be taught in one semester. It is a book for first-year college students who have an interest in pursuing a career in Physics or a closely related field. 

Throughout the decade of the 1990’s, I taught a one-year course of a specialized nature to students who entered Yale College with excellent preparation in Mathematics and the Physical Sciences, and who expressed an interest in Physics or a closely related field. The level of the course was that typified by the Feynman Lectures on Physics. My one-year course was necessarily more restricted in content than the two-year Feynman Lectures. The depth of treatment of each topic was limited by the fact that the course consisted of a total of fifty-two lectures, each lasting one-and-a-quarter hours. The key role played by invariants in the Physical Universe was constantly emphasized . The material that I covered each Fall is presented, almost verbatim, in this book.

Lectures on Physics

 Author: Benjamin Crowel

 Year: 2011

 Content URL: Link To Content

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 for a one-year course and gives honest explanations of everything it touches on. 

The publishers try to please everybody by including every imaginable topic in the book, but end up pleasing nobody. There is wide agreement among physics teachers that the traditional one-year introductory textbooks cannot in fact be taught in one year. 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." 

The movement to reform physics texts is steaming ahead, but despite excellent books such as Hewitt's Conceptual Physics for nonscience majors and Knight's Physics: A Contemporary Perspective for students who know calculus, there has been a gap in physics books for life-science majors who haven't learned calculus or are learning it concurrently with physics. This book is meant to fill that gap.

Mathematical Tools for Physics

 Authors: James Nearing , University of Miami

 Year: 2003

 Content URL: Link To Content

I wrote this text for a one semester course at the sophomore-junior level. Our experience with students taking our junior physics courses is that even if they’ve had the mathematical prerequisites, they usually need more experience using the mathematics to handle it efficiently and to possess usable intuition about the processes involved. If you’ve seen infinite series in a calculus course, you may have no idea that they’re good for anything. If you’ve taken a differential equations course, which of the scores of techniques that you’ve seen are really used a lot? The world is (at least) three dimensional so you clearly need to understand multiple integrals, but will everything be rectangular? 

How do you learn intuition? 

When you’ve finished a problem and your answer agrees with the back of the book or with your friends or even a teacher, you’re not done. The way do get an intuitive understanding of the mathematics and of the physics is to analyze your solution thoroughly. Does it make sense? There are almost always several parameters that enter the problem, so what happens to your solution when you push these parameters to their limits? In a mechanics problem, what if one mass is much larger than another? Does your solution do the right thing? In electromagnetism, if you make a couple of parameters equal to each other does it reduce everything to a simple, special case? When you’re doing a surface integral should the answer be positive or negative and does your answer agree? 

When you address these questions to every problem you ever solve, you do several things. First, you’ll find your own mistakes before someone else does. Second, you acquire an intuition about how the equations ought to behave and how the world that they describe ought to behave. Third, It makes all your later efforts easier because you will then have some clue about why the equations work the way they do. It reifies algebra. 

Does it take extra time? Of course. It will however be some of the most valuable extra time you can spend. 

Is it only the students in my classes, or is it a widespread phenomenon that no one is willing to sketch a graph? (“Pulling teeth” is the clich´e that comes to mind.) Maybe you’ve never been taught that there are a few basic methods that work, so look at section 1.8. And keep referring to it. This is one of those basic tools that is far more important than you’ve ever been told. It is astounding how many problems become simpler after you’ve sketched a graph. Also, until you’ve sketched some graphs of functions you really don’t know how they behave. 

Motion Mountain - The Free Physics Textbook

 Author: Dr. Christoph Schiller

 Year: 2011

 Content URL: Link To Content

Across all languages, physics is the science with the worst textbooks. This project wants to change this, by producing a simple, captivating and up-to-date introduction to modern physics. 'Simple' means that concepts are stressed more than formalism; 'captivating' means that the reader is continuously entertained, motivated and challenged; 'up-to-date' means that modern research results are included. The subtitle of the text, The Adventure of Physics, sums up these three aspects. 

Didactics 

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. In addition, the story should appeal to those who like the natural sciences and to those who like the humanities. Finally, the story should motivate, entertain and startle both beginners and experts in physics. 
The approach starts with an uncommon, but clear definition of physics: physics is the science of motion. The project then takes the search for a precise description of motion as a guiding principle for an exploration of modern physics. This leads to a storyline which is somewhat different from the usual one. Nature's limits to speed, entropy, force, action and charge are central to the presentation. 

Physics I: Classical Mechanics

 Author: Walter Lewin

 Year: 1999

 Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare

 Content URL: Link To Content

Course Highlights 

The 35 video lectures by Professor Lewin, were recorded on the MIT campus during the Fall of 1999. Prof. Lewin is well known at MIT and beyond for his dynamic and engaging lecture style. 
Course Description 

8.01 is a first-semester freshman physics class in Newtonian Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, and Kinetic Gas Theory. In addition to the basic concepts of Newtonian Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, and Kinetic Gas Theory, a variety of interesting topics are covered in this course: Binary Stars, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Resonance Phenomena, Musical Instruments, Stellar Collapse, Supernovae, Astronomical observations from very high flying balloons (lecture 35), and you will be allowed a peek into the intriguing Quantum World.

Physics Tutorials

Content URL: Link To Content
Contents: 

REMEDIAL 
Dimensional Analysis 
Graphing Oscillating Fns. 
Trigonometry 
Graphing Simple Fns. 
Graphing Log Paper 
Logarithms 
Algebra 
Vectors 
Unit Conversions 
Significant digits 

TUTORIALS 
Torque and Rotational Motion 
DC Circuits 
Free-Body Diagrams 
Exponent. Growth and Decay 
Simple Harmonic Motion 

MATHCAD EXERCISES 
PHYS*1130 
PHYS*3220 

BIOPHYSICS TUTOR 
Selected Text Problem Solutions(1080) 
Solutions to Self Tests 

SAMPLE EXAMS 

Extra Problems  

Physics Tutorials (Launceston College)

Content URL: Link To Content
Physics PH866 ( as studied in Tasmania, Australia ) 

A year 12 subject of physics topics designed for entry to tertiary sciences, engineering and aviation. 
It is normal to have been successful in year 11 Physical Sciences SC786 before attempting this course. 
Students will need to be confident in mathematics at reasonably advanced levels. 
Students find the subject deeply interesting as it provides insight into many natural phenomena. 

Topics include 

Newtonian physics - we work up to looking at satellites and gravity near massive stars. 
Static electricity - which eventually gets linked to atom models. 
Magnetism as linked to moving charges - we look at both motors and generation of AC current and charges moving in the Earth's magnetosphere causing aurorae. 
Waves in their diversity, sound light - transverse and longitudinal waves - to the point of diffraction, refraction and polarization. 
Early 20th century physics including Xrays, wave-particle duality and nuclear mass-energy transfer. 

Practical work, open ended experimentation, library research and demonstrations are a normal part of the course.   

Richard Feynman: The Messenger Series

Content URL: Link To Content
"The site allows the user to watch Feynman with subtitles; to take notes that link to specific points in the video timeline and video transcript; and to access expert commentary, bibliographic references and Web links, all also linked to points on the video timeline. The user can search the transcript for keywords and then click on those words to watch that section of the video. However, the multimedia presentation can only be viewed using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. 

Bill Gates says in an introduction on the Project Tuva Web site that he has been hoping to share the Feynman lectures with the world for 20 years. 

“I think these Messenger Series lectures [Feynman] gives are the best science lectures I’ve ever seen,” he says. 

“I think someone who can make science interesting is magical. And the person who did that better than anybody was Richard Feynman. He took the mystery of science, the importance of science, the strangeness of science, and made it fun and interesting and approachable.”" 

Work sited: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/07/15/feynman-messenger-lectures-now-available-online/  

The Particle Adventure

Content URL: Link To Content
People have long asked: 

"What is the world made of?" and "What holds it together?" 

What is the World Made of? 

Why do so many things in this world share the same characteristics? 

People have come to realize that the matter of the world is made from a few fundamental building blocks of nature. 

The word "fundamental" is key here. By fundamental building blocks we mean objects that are simple and structureless -- not made of anything smaller. 

Even in ancient times, people sought to organize the world around them into fundamental elements, such as earth, air, fire, and water.