Abstract
I opened this book with considerable enthusiasm since it looked to be just the kind of thing that could be very useful for first-year undergraduate teaching. It is published by the Cambridge University Press, one of the authors comes from the University of Leicester and the other from the Israel Institute of Technology and the first surprise that I had was that the spelling is American. The second surprise was that the authors make a point in the preface that no calculus is used in any of the calculations. I then twigged that this book is designed specifically for the American market; that, of course, does not invalidate it but I find it difficult to see exactly where it can fit in this side of the Atlantic. The next thing that I looked at was the list of physical constants to see how good the proofreading was. There is one error in the (quite short) list, which made me wary. However, I subsequently found very few typographical errors, so there is not much to complain of there.
The general level of questions is certainly way beyond school physics and is quite appropriate to first-year university work but the positive non-use of calculus would make me think twice about recommending it to a student for his or her private study. Having said that, I would be very happy to use many, if not most, of the questions as tutorial examples. Any student, or physics graduate for that matter, who could answer all the questions in this book would have a very sound grasp of basic physics. A particularly good feature is the provision of comprehensive solutions to all the problems, and these are grouped together in the second half of the book. They are a great comfort when one feels a little unsure of how best to tackle a particular problem.
The general presentation and style is good. There are three main sections, each of which is prefaced by a brief digest of the relevant physics. I like that, since most textbooks these days are far too large and wordy and make it hard for the student (a) to carry them around and (b) to get an overview of a topic. There are of course dangers in such a brief digest and I certainly found a number of items to which I took exception. Some of these are simplifications which might be appropriate and acceptable at a relatively low level but are certainly not acceptable at university level. Others are simply incorrect at any level. An example of the first can be found in the first chapter, which is about Mechanics. A table of moments of inertia refers to unspecified symmetry axes. Most of the bodies in this table have several symmetry axes, so which one does the student choose? There are lots of good questions following the summary but too many of them, for my taste, have a military connotation and I suspect that many teachers might also find them a little disquieting. No people, only `targets', actually appear to get shot or bombed but such questions still make me feel slightly uncomfortable.
The next chapter is entitled Electricity and Magnetism. The digest contains all you need to know but I do not like, for example, `The electric field and electric charge vanish everywhere inside a perfect conductor'. The first of these is only true in the static case and is a case of misleading oversimplification. I am not sure what the second means at any level other than the most trivial! There is a missing sin(θ) at the bottom of page 50 which could mislead but is presumably a typographical error. The expression of Faraday's law is oversimplified in that it is correct only for a single-turn circuit. It is also stated backwards, which is curious. Again there are lots of good questions, which range from the easy and confidence-building to the quite demanding.
Chapter 3 is is entitled Matter and Waves and seems to be everything else, including relativity which might have gone in the Mechanics chapter to be logical. In the digest section I read, and can accept, that water is effectively incompressible but I am still trying to work out why air is also incompressible `if we do not consider sonic or supersonic motions'. The definition of the mole is most curious, a fair approximation but not correct. What is wrong with the standard `number of entities (atoms) in 12 g of carbon-12'?
The section on the Doppler effect is far too simplified both for electromagnetic waves and for sound waves. The first ignores relativity and the second ignores the speed of the medium. The section on the Compton effect refers to light scattered by a free electron. Now I know that this is technically correct but it is more usual to refer to the more common and practical case of high energy electromagnetic waves such as x-rays. In beta decay, we are informed, a neutron disintegrates into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. The neutron certainly does this but it is far too simplistic a description of beta decay in a nucleus even if we ignore the emission of positrons in beta+ decay. Another batch of questions follows, finishing with ten on relativity. Most of the questions are unexceptional although the answer to question 449, which asks why a 15 m focal length refracting telescope is more difficult to build than a reflecting telescope with the same magnification, baffles me entirely. The image is always formed at the focal point of the objective whether it is a mirror or a lens! There might be a subtlety to do with catadioptric instruments but that is not apparent in the question or the answer. I must confess also that I have a prejudice against absurd questions on relativity such as those which have to do with observers measuring lengths of rods as they fly past at nearly the speed of light or alien spaceships travelling at 0.6c firing missiles all over the place. I do wish that designers of questions on this topic would stick to real-life relativity as it is at present. I suppose that, one day, an alien flying past the Earth at 0.998c might fall in love with an Earthling - but I doubt it!
Overall, do I commend this book? With reservations, yes. It is a good idea which, unfortunately, misses the British market by falling between two possible constituencies. This is not to say that it is of no use to teachers. Both sixth-form teachers and HE teachers can draw many good ideas from the questions for teaching but, as I said at the outset, I would hesitate to recommend it as a student book except in a first-year university course at a traditional post-school level in which calculus is not used, and I do not think that there are many of those around.