Physics in Context

by Michael Crawford, John Chamberlain, John Souders Jr.

Physics is a part of each person's life. The goal of this book is to break the physics barrier by allowing students to explore, experience, understand, and apply physics to real life.

525 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Anthony M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a robber comes up to you and tells you, “If you can’t tell me what Carnot Efficiency is, I will steal your wallet!” But luckily for you, you have read Physics in Context by Michael Crawford, so you tell them that, “Carnot efficiency is the maximum possible efficiency of a heat engine,” and are able to continue your life as normal. This book is a textbook meant to teach you about physics concepts, and I received this textbook from my physics class at school. I would rate this book 4 out of 5 stars, because even though this book succeeds greatly at teaching you information, sometimes something does confuse you and there isn’t much more than a few examples to help you understand it. Despite not being a book with a story, this textbook very much functions like one, in that if you didn’t read earlier chapters you wouldn’t be able to understand what is going on currently, because everything builds off of each other. For example, you probably want to understand the basics of an electrical system, before you try to understand work in an electrical system. Despite being a textbook, this isn’t actually a boring read, because the things you are reading about give you a further understanding of how the world around you works. Before reading this book I thought that modern technology and the gravitational forces of objects were crazy things I would never understand, but this book shows me how a lot of those things are much simpler than I thought and actually make a lot of sense. I wasn’t expecting to be as entertained as I was by this book, as it is a textbook, but this book was better than I thought it would be. And if that isn’t enough of a reason to read this book, try to imagine the beginning scenario without having read this book.

[Micah Schmitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm writing this report for a school report, so if at any point it seems oddly structured, it is. So overall this book is structured around physics and teaching it to the reader. It does this by providing examples, listing out formulas, and explanation formulas between the prior two. As this is an informational text, there isn't any story development. However as you progress through the book, concepts begin to tie together and build upon each other. As it is a physics textbook, it repeatedly mentions physics and physics topics. It doesn't really differ much which is to be expected from a physics book. Again, as it is an informational text, the tone is simply that of being an informational text. It doesn't have a lesson to teach other than that of physics. It doesn't really have a tone. Overall it does its job well. It's helped me learn quite a bit of physics that I failed to learn in class. However, it's examples are often confusing, not showing you exactly how to do such a problem, but how to do a more complicated version of the problem. Otherwise it's a helpful text, especially in the back of the book, where there are several helpful charts. Mainly showing unit conversions and proper units for equations. It's overall more helpful than confusing.