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[Phys-l] lightandmatter.com



Hi Folks --

If you have a moment, I recommend checking out this web site:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/

It's run by Benjamin Crowell, who is a professor at Fullerton.
He's written a physics text aimed at "life science majors".
The whole book is on the web, free for all, subject to generous
license. His rationale for all this is here:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/area1why.html

The about-the-author page is here:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/area4author.html

I haven't scrutinized the whole book, but here are my first
impressions:
*) I like the way it starts. It asks an interesting question
and then answers it by elementary means, in such a way as to
illustrate the power of physics in general and scaling laws
in particular.
*) The second chapter seems fine.
*) The chapter on E&M seems muddled. It looks like it hasn't
received anywhere near the level of TLC as the earlier chapters.
There are unexpanded typesetting directives lying around; I
can't imagine how that happened or how it has gone undetected.
At a deeper level it spends too much time on the historical
and biographical fluff. I'm allergic to that sort of thing;
I think students, especially at the intro level, should be
given the best available evidence, not the most ancient evidence.
They don't need a song-and-dance routine about the pseudo-history
of cathode rays.

Overall, it seems pretty decent. If you're stuck with a bad book,
or even just a bad chapter in the adopted book, this gives you
some options.

The license allows you to do almost anything with it, including
copying it and making your own additions and modifications.


Crowell also runs the "assayer" site:
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi
which has pointers to over 1000 free online books, including
almost 1000 science/math/computing-related online books:
http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/asbrowsesubject.cgi?class=Q


I'm gonna bookmark this. It seems well worth further exploration.