Product Description

Unravel the mystery of physics!

With Physics Demystified you master the subject one simple step at a time--at your own speed. Unlike most books on physics, general principles are presented first--and the details follow. In order to make the learning process as clear and simple as possible, heavy-duty math, formulas, and equations are kept to a minimum. This unique self-teaching guide offers questions at the end of each chapter and section to pinpoint weaknesses, and a 100-question final exam to reinforce the entire book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107604 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 599 pages

From the Back Cover
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO UNDERSTAND PHYSICS

Now anyone with an interest in the physical sciences can master physics -- without formal training or drowning in a sea of complicated formulas and equations. In Physics Demystified best-selling author Stan Gibilisco offers a fun, effective, and totally painless way to learn the fundamentals and general concepts of physics.

With Physics Demystified you master the subject one simple step at a time – at your own speed. Unlike most books on physics, general principles are presented first – and the details follow. In order to make the learning process as clear and simple as possible, heavy-duty math, formulas, and equations are kept to a minimum. This unique self-teaching guide offers questions at the end of each chapter and section to pinpoint weaknesses, and a 100-question final exam to reinforce the entire book.

Simple enough for a beginner but challenging enough for an advanced student, Physics Demystified is your direct route to learning or brushing up on physics.

HERE’S EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO:
* Understand the math used in physical science
* Solve mass/force/acceleration problems
* Create mathematical models of physical phenomena
* Perform distance vs. time calculations
* Determine potential and kinetic energy
* Calculate the wavelength of sounds and radio signals
* Understand visible light interference patterns
* Calculate the energy and frequency of a moving particle
* Understand atomic structure
* Learn about electric current, voltage, resistance, power, and energy

About the Author
Stan Gibilisco is one of McGraw-Hill’s most diverse and best-selling authors. Known for his clear, user-friendly, and entertaining writing style, Mr. Gibilisco’s depth of knowledge and ease of presentation makes him an excellent choice for a book such as Physics Demystified. His previous titles for McGraw-Hill include The TAB Encyclopedia of Electronics for Technicians and Hobbyists, Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, and the Illustrated Dictionary of Electronics. Booklist named his book, The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Personal Computing, one of the Best References of 1996.

Customer Reviews

A Self-Teching Guide That Just Doesn't Do It
Despite the author's best efforts this guide is not much of a self-teaching guide nor does it provide a solid grounding in physical mathematics. I bought this to learn on my own the basic concepts of physics. The book starts well with a revision of college maths but quickly gets mired in a fog of quadratic equations, trigonometry and celestial coordinates which I have no doubt one needs to master for physics but annoyingly do not really get used in the rest of the book. Why bother? One should buy a proper maths book if one needs to study maths. The section on degree of accuracy and on using the appropriate units (kg or grams, m or cm, etc.) was instructive but the author kept going on about these all through the book just like an irritating parent.

The early section on classical physics was quite good especially the illustrations of force, mass, energy etc but the author goes on to cover so much that he starts to race through things (short paragraphs followed by a quick question and answer) that I was losing it by the advent of pressure and density. And this got worse in the chapters covering electricity and magnetism. Fortunately and surprisingly the book ends quite well with the clearest explanation of Einstein's theories of relativity that I've read.

Overall I think that there's far too much subject matter to cover for this single digestible volume and perhaps two volumes with all parts covered as clearly as the first few chapters on classical physics would have been a superior approach. For the potential reader I suggest looking around for a "better" self-teaching guide.

Physics Demystified, not really
I wanted this book to help me to teach Physics A level. In fact it teaches very little, it just puts people off Physics.

Firstly there is far too much maths, some is straightforward but the inclusion of unreal numbers will blow most people away.

The american approach with constant multiple choice questions does not help understanding it merely encourages rote learning of simplistic answers.

It simply cannot get its head round SI units. It would be helpful if it would stick to kilogram-metre-second and not muddy the water with centimetre-gram-second units. The author seems to think that dimensional analysis complicates matters whereas it is central to understanding, if you have a formula where the answer has units of kg metre squared seconds -2 then you have energy, period.

I did find it useful in defining some obscure cms and imperial units but otherwise it always seemed to rush the hard stuff.

There are many far better text books for A level physics, if you are a layperson then please avoid this book as it will put you off physics for good.

One of the great DeMYSTiFieD series
This book is much more than a catchy title or a glossy cover. I have read the real thing that can get you bogged down in detail and on the other end of the spectrum when trying to describe physics without math only get gobbledygook.

The book is well designed and has a chapter zero for those of us that need a redresser on just enough maths to make the descriptions make sense. However I found some items that they never covered in class. The math problems in class were always sanitized not to always have and answer and not allow you to ask odd questions that the instructor so not prepaid to answer. Not being a math book (they do have Demystified books on math) you get just what you need and forget the rest. In just a few pages you cover years of math but it is so much clearer than the stuff you had before. There is a good section on vectors alone that describe:

Vectors in two dimensions
Vectors in three dimensions
Multiplication by scalar
Commutativity of addition
Commutativity of vector-scalar multiplication
Commutativity of dot product
Negative commutativity of cross product
Associativity of addition
Associativity of vector-scalar multiplication
Dristributivity of scalar multiplication over scalar addition
Dristributivity of scalar multiplication over vector addition
Dristributivity of dot product over vector addition
Dristributivity of dot cross over vector addition
Dot product of cross products

So you can see that just about every base is covered as far as math before starting to demystify physics.

No book can cover everything but this one comes pretty close to describing all the terms and actually showing you how they work.
The book seems to be really heavily waited toward electro magnetism; probably because the author Stan Gibilisco has more books in that field. When you have finished this book you can hold up your end in a physics discussion or Relativity Theory for that matter.