Thursday 20 May 2010

"50 Physics Ideas you really need to know" by Joanne Baker

Since I am a Physics teacher I am perhaps not the expected audience for this book.

There were some sections which I felt were rather poorly explained such as the Ideal Gas Law. And the section on Hooke's Law seemed to muddle other ideas in with it. And the book opens with Mach's principle which I have always understood to be essentially about the strange equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass whereas Baker is linking it to frames of reference.

So I was disappointed at the start.

But when it got into quantum theory and strong theory and cosmology I was much more interested and I believe I started learning things I hadn't know before. Now I was frustrated that there wasn't more detail in the explanations.

You can't win!

May 2010; 203 pages

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