Steeped in 20th-century perspective and committed to providing a conceptual overview of the discipline, Hecht's PHYSICS: CALCULUS, Second Edition is a return to basics. Strong pedagogy, a descriptive focus, a knock-out art program, biological/medical applications, and help with the MCAT are some of the reasons why professors use this ground-breaking text. Hecht's passion and enthusiasm for the subject matter is apparent on every page.
While Hecht covers a range of material from kinetics to quantum physics, he carefully limits the mathematics required to basic calculus and vector analysis, though you'll note an increased use of calculus in the Second Edition. He omits obscure, high-level topics, while focusing on helping students understand the fundamental concepts of modern-day physics. Calculus and vector analysis are both thoroughly developed as tools to illuminate the physics. Hecht deliberately goes slowly, justifying where each topic is going, stopping to take stock of where the students have been, and pausing along the way to let students discover for themselves the unity of the discipline as each piece begins to from the whole. A text-correlated problem-solving CD-ROM is included with each new copy of the text to help students with vital problem-solving skills.
Historical materials include details of the lives of great scientists making these larger-than-life figures less intimidating and their work more approachable. In a similar vein, the book is responsive to significant contributions made by women in physics. Most important, the historical approach allows physics to unfold more clearly.
Hecht motivates students to learn how physics directly affects their lives with answers to practical questions such as, How do we walk? Why do bones break? How does a speedometer work? Many photographs throughout the text depict commonplace phenomena that usually go unnoticed. A new feature called Exploring Physics on Your Own gives students experiment
