Product Description

Re>University Physics with Modern Physics, Twelfth Edition continues an unmatched history of innovation and careful execution that was established by the bestselling Eleventh Edition. Assimilating the best ideas from education research, this new edition provides enhanced problem-solving instruction, pioneering visual and conceptual pedagogy, the first systematically enhanced problems, and the most pedagogically proven and widely used homework and tutorial system available.

Using Young & Freedman's research-based ISEE (Identify, Set Up, Execute, Evaluate) problem-solving strategy, students develop the physical intuition and problem-solving skills required to tackle the text's extensive high-quality problem sets, which have been developed and refined over the past five decades. Incorporating proven techniques from educational research that have been shown to improve student learning, the figures have been streamlined in color and detail to focus on the key physics and integrate 'chalkboard-style' guiding commentary. Critically acclaimed ‘visual’ chapter summaries help students to consolidate their understanding by presenting each concept in words, math, and figures.

Renowned for its superior problems, the Twelfth Edition goes further. Unprecedented analysis of national student metadata has allowed every problem to be systematically enhanced for educational effectiveness, and to ensure problem sets of ideal topic coverage, balance of qualitative and quantitative problems, and range of difficulty and duration.

If a professor adopts MasteringPhysicsTM, every new copy of the text includes access to it — the most widely used, educationally proven, and technically advanced tutorial and homework system in the world. Uniquely able to tutor each student individually with feedback specific to their errors and simpler subproblems upon demand, MasteringPhysics™ now incorporates free-hand graphs, free-body diagrams, ray-tracing diagrams, even ranking-task activities. MasteringPhysics™ provides all the problems from the text as well as tutorials specific to the Problem-Solving Strategies and Test Your Understanding questions in each chapter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25806 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback
• 1632 pages

About the Author

Hugh D. Young is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He attended Carnegie Mellon for both undergraduate and graduate study and earned his Ph.D. in fundamental particle theory under the direction of the late Richard Cutkosky. He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon in 1956 and has also spent two years as a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Prof. Young’s career has centered entirely around undergraduate education. He has written several undergraduate-level textbooks, and in 1973 he became a co-author with Francis Sears and Mark Zemansky for their well-known introductory texts. With their deaths, he assumed full responsibility for new editions of these books until joined by Prof. Freedman for University Physics.

Prof. Young is an enthusiastic skier, climber, and hiker. He also served for several years as Associate Organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh, and has played numerous organ recitals in the Pittsburgh area. Prof. Young and his wife Alice usually travel extensively in the summer, especially in Europe and in the desert canyon country of southern Utah.

Roger A. Freedman is a Lecturer in Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Freedman was an undergraduate at the University of California campuses in San Diego and Los Angeles, and did his doctoral research in nuclear theory at Stanford University under the direction of Professor J. Dirk Walecka. He came to UCSB in 1981 after three years teaching and doing research at the University of Washington.

At UCSB, Dr. Freedman has taught in both the Department of Physics and the College of Creative Studies, a branch of the university intended for highly gifted and motivated undergraduates. He has published research in nuclear physics, elementary particle physics, and laser physics. In recent years, he has helped to develop computer-based tools for learning introductory physics and astronomy. When not in the classroom or slaving over a computer, Dr. Freedman can be found either flying (he holds a commercial pilot’s license) or driving with his wife, Caroline, in their 1960 Nash Metropolitan convertible.

A. Lewis Ford is Professor of Physics at Texas A&M University. He received a B.A. from Rice University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972. After a one-year postdoc at Harvard University, he joined the Texas A&M physics faculty in 1973 and has been there ever since. Professor Ford’s research area is theoretical atomic physics, with a specialization in atomic collisions. At Texas A&M he has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, but primarily introductory physics.

Customer Reviews

Big Big Big Big Book
The book is usefull, don't get me wrong, but it's just too damn big to be in one volume. It's rediculusly heavy, even with thin pages, which come out really easily. I think there is/was a three volume edition. If you can find it get those instead.

Young and Freedman is a great textbook :)
This is a standard text in the US, and is the standard first year physics text for Warwick University. It's meant to be a jack-of-all trades book, covering pretty much everything you need to know for a basic degree introduction.

As such, everything from mechanics to electricity and magnetism to particle and quantum physics is covered in detail. It's written clearly, in a way that students like myself (i'm going into my second year) will understand and contains hundreds of practice questions with answers to the odd question numbers. Some universities also make use of "Mastering Physics" which is an online service which they can use to set work for students in various topic areas (you get an id number with the book that is unique to you).

Personally i thought it was a great textbook. One of the major shortcomings in most books of this sort is the lack of problems. Unlike maths where you're typically flooded with questions, physics tends to be a lot more "here's the equation, get used to it" which makes exams more difficult. Having 100 or so questions of varying difficulty after each chapter made things a lot easier for revision.

The downside is that some things are not included, for instance there is no mention of complex numbers, even for waves or quantum - this is apparently due to US courses being taken by people who aren't necessarily taking Physics as their primary degree. So, some things are omitted as a result and derivations are missed for that reason. And of course with a book of this size, some answers to problems will inevitably be wrong - but it's not a serious issue.

It's well worth getting if you're looking for an all encompassing revision guide for undergraduate physics. Whilst it probably isn't useful past the first year, it will serve as a good reminder if you forget things!

Excellent but requires time
If there's something you don't understand (at undergraduate level mind) and it's relatively basic to physics, you definitely will understand after reading this. It explains it all extremely thoroughly, which is good but also why I didn't give it 5 stars. Sometimes it's too long and it feels like it takes ages to get anywhere. Don't use this book to learn a course, use this book when you're stuck on a concept you don't understand because the explanation will be so lengthy and slow paced that you're very likely to understand by then end of it (or else just accept it as it is and move on).