Main Handout: Required Purchases

Physics 121, Fall 2010

Prof. E. F. Redish

Required Purchases:

You are required to purchase three items for this class:

• A Clicker -- a remote control device from TurningPoint that allows you to contribute answers in lecture. It is available at the Campus Book Store. This is the campus standard. If you have one from another class, you are likely to able to use it here. If you have an iPhone or iTouch you should be able to use it as a clicker. See the campus clicker page for more information.
• A Tutorial and Lab Manual -- a booklet containing worksheets for use in the discussion session. It is available at the Campus Book Store. It also contains for your convenience a description of the labs and the guides to the labs themselves (one page each).
• An Online HW service -- most of the HW will be done online through the online service, MasteringPhysics, from Pearson publishers. You may buy this at the bookstore or at http://www.masteringphysics.com/site/register/new-students.html. The course code is PHYS121Redish. (You can buy this without a text. See below.)

Note that you are NOT required to purchase a textbook. The class is not built on the assumption that you will be reading a text, but rather that you will be attending all lectures, tutorials, and doing the homework carefully. The online HW service also provides a set of tutorials that you may find useful.

Texts:

I tend to discourage the use of a text in this class as too many students use a physics text incorrectly -- trying to memorize large blocks of information -- and this leads them badly astray. This class in NOT about memorizing but about LEARNING TO THINK. Understanding and learning to reason from a small number of fundamental principles will suffice.

But if you do like reading a text, and think you can do it as a way to help you make sense of physics rather than as a source of a lot of meaningless memorized glop, some options are listed below. You may purchase any used physics text but then will have to find the relevant sections yourself. You may also look up things on the web, but BE CAREFUL! There is a lot of introductory physics information on the web, but a lot of it is either misleading or just plain WRONG. "But I read it on the web", is not a valid excuse for a wrong answer on a quiz, exam, or homework.

Problems will not be assigned from the text (they will all be given on the web).

The recommended texts are:

• Knight, Jones and Field, College Physics: A Strategic Approach, Pearson/Addison WesleyPublishers
• Touger, Introductory Physics: Building Understanding, John Wiley & Sons

Some chapters of my text (a calculus-based text, but more in line with my approach) will be made available online on the our Blackboard page.

• Cummings, Laws, Redish, and Cooney, Understanding Physics, John Wiley & Sons

Relevant readings from the recommended texts are listed on the schedule page. The readings listed are NOT meant to be assignments; they cover more material than you will be responsible for. The indicated chapters include some of the material discussed in lecture and tutorial and provide another angle on the material.

RETURNS

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Last revision 28 August, 2010.