Physics I For Dummies. Steven Holzner

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Introduction

      Physics is what it’s all about. What what’s all about? Everything. Physics is present in every action around you. And because physics is everywhere, it gets into some tricky places, which means it can be hard to follow. Studying physics can be even worse when you’re reading some dense textbook that’s hard to follow.

      For most people who come into contact with physics, textbooks that land with 1,200-page whumps on desks are their only exposure to this amazingly rich and rewarding field. And what follows are weary struggles as the readers try to scale the awesome bulwarks of the massive tomes. What’s vastly different about this physics book is that it’s written from the reader’s point of view.

About This Book

      Physics I For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is all about physics from your point of view. We know that most students share one common trait: confusion. As in, “I’m confused about what I did to deserve such torture.”

      This book is different. Instead of writing it from the physicist’s or professor’s point of view, we wrote it from the reader’s point of view. We’ve taken great care to jettison the top-down kinds of explanations instead of the usual book presentation of this topic. You don’t survive one-on-one tutoring sessions for long unless you get to know what really makes sense to people — what they want to see from their points of view. In other words, this book is designed to be crammed full of the good stuff — and only the good stuff. You also discover unique ways of looking at problems that professors and teachers use to make figuring out the problems simple.

Conventions Used in This Book

      Some books have a dozen conventions that you need to know before you can start. Not this one. All you need to know is that variables and new terms appear in italics, like this, and that vectors — items that have both a magnitude and a direction — appear in bold. Web addresses appear in monofont.

What You're Not to Read

      We provide two elements in this book that you don’t have to read at all if you’re not interested in the inner workings of physics — sidebars and paragraphs marked with a Technical Stuff icon.

      Sidebars provide a little