Matter & Interactions I: Modern Mechanics

In my freshman physics class we used this book. I had already taken an AP Physics course in high school but still did not know many things. The AP physics class actually confused me. This book has been able to clearify everything! It was a very readable book which is hard to say about textbooks.

This is a great book. It is a book you can read through, it reads better than any other text book I have read. It is not like most physics text books. If you are looking for just formulas and problems to plug and chug you need to look somewhere else, this is a far deeper book than that. This is for people that actually want a solid backbone in physics learn the how and why, understand the concepts. The problems in this volume can be pretty difficult, but the information to solve them are in the chapter, The book makes you think for your self. The questoins are structured so you can not memorize problem types and the equations to plug and chug, they test understanding. The result of this approch is you are far better positioned to handle physics problems that you have never seen before, where people that just want plug and chug fall apart on problems they have never seen.If you are taking a class with this book and problems are assigned from the book and you have not read the book and you want to just pick information you need to solve the problem... its not easy finding information in the book, you have to read it.This book and Vol 2 which I highly recommend also have taught me the most about physics... before this book and I was asked a Physics question that was "why" oriented alot of the time I would be I dont know I just know this is the formula you use. Now I know alot of the "whys".In alot of other Physics text books from chapter to chapter the information presented seems to be completely disjoint no real connection. This book connects chapter and chapter.The book does have some problems where you write computer simulations, but the language they use is free to download and pretty easy to learn compared to most programming languages. If you dont want to write the programs... you can download alot of them from the authors website to look over.There are different versions of this book out there, sometime in 2003 they re-printed and fixed some errors in vol 1 and vol 2... I think the ISBN number was changed when this happened... I would check with the publishers website to make sure you are purchasing the most upto date version.I have the old versions before the re-print with corrections... and I am going to go buy the new re-prints, normally I would not bother, but the two volumes are such great books.From the Physics classes I took with the two volumes, the people that did not like this book were people that did not want to understand the subject they just wanted to be able to memorize types of problems and the equations to plug and chug. They did not want to read the book, they just wanted through the class with the least amount of effect, understanding was not a priority.

I've used this text for my calculus-based intro physics course since before it was officially available (since fall 1999). There is no other text like it. The emphases on estimation, programming, and real world problems (as opposed to sanitized plug and chug problems) make for a VERY different experience for students and instructors alike. In my opinion, the highlight of Volume I is the treatment of energy concepts in chapters 4-6. No other text is as meticulous with terminology as this one. Instructors will have to rethink what and how they were first taught about this material. Volume I culminates in showing how mechanics and thermodynamics are united via statistical mechanics, and the approach is extraordinary. Students using this text will be better prepared for future courses than their peers who use the traditional texts; there is research to back this up. The authors provide unrivaled user support too.

I had the privilege of learning freshmen physics from the authors. The authors and their book present a new way of learning physics. Although the exercises are nontraditional, I find them to be more insightful than simple "plug and chug" problems.

While some of the examples in the text need to be fleshed out a bit, and the problems at the end the of the chapters are somewhat too oriented toward programming problems, on the whole I am finding this to be an extraordinary text. I am teaching it to freshman physics majors, and even those who've had significant high school physics (includng AP) have never really seen a physics course like this, and it seems to be keeping them excited. Unlike the standard freshman college texts, which simply reiterate the high school curriculum at a slightly higher level (and makes them do blocks on planes and pulleys ad nauseum), Matter and Interaction introduces classical mechanics alongside modern, alongside relativity. I have also found it a useful jumping-off point to discuss oscillators and circuits. Though the authors will need to do a bit of fine-tuning in future editions, I highly recommend this as an excellent freshman physics curriculum.