text books

[lauradi7dw]

A while back, when eclecticmagpie moved his workshop from one building to another, I rescued a stack of old Physics books from the trash pile, thinking that I'd drop them off at Goodwill, or at a minimum recycle them. They're still in the house, and this morning (after nearly a year of using a bright shiny heavy expensive modern Physics book) I flipped through a few of them. Most of them are from the 1960s, but a few are older. Through my current level of Physics (we're up to about WWI, I guess, which is to say that the problems I was working through last night are based on Einstein's photon formula), there is very little in our book (printed last year) that wasn't covered in any of those books, sometimes with the same line drawings, although I admit that having ray drawings in color improves clarity. I think really that the addition of color in textbooks is the main improvement, and I can't say whether it's worth the hundreds of dollars of additional cost. It also is irritating to have glossy coating on the pages - it leads to a lot of glare when reading.
Despite the fact that they make full use of power point slides and videos of demonstrations and so forth, both of the professors I've had basically seem to feel that the real change in intro Physics since they were learning it is hand-held calculators. I'm in the same generation, more or less - I remember using tables in the back of the book for trig functions (and logarithms, etc) and am still regularly filled with wonder at the ease of using the calculator instead of tables or a slide rule. I guess there's new knowledge in Physics every day (only a month until the Large Hadron Collider gets going) but we aren't quite going to make it to the present - we have another hundred pages to cover by Tuesday (the final exam is Wednesday) and the last chapter in the book, the one about quarks, will be left off.

Comments

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

There are so many people we know in common. I too helped eclecticmagpie move his workshop, I was a physics major, roughly your vintage, and we live a few miles from each other... yet I have no recollection of ever meeting you. Very odd how these things work.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I've seen you in I Sebastiani performances at some point. I don't go to many SCA events and I'm kind of boring when I'm there, so you may not have noticed me.

[ichseke.livejournal.com]

I was reading about the LHC in Science News the other day. My physics knowledge is mostly limited to two intro semesters as an undergrad, but from what I can understand this looks very exciting.

[annag.livejournal.com]

In math books, the notation has improved somewhat since the 1960s, though some of my University textbooks were Dover editions.