Physics:
Power Tools for
Problem Solving

by Craig Rusbult, Ph.D.

It was the best of books, it was the worst of books.

      Well, it may not be "the best" but I think it's pretty good.  Physics: Power Tools for Problem Solving was written to serve as a supplementary book for students learning first-year physics.  I finished working on it in July 1989 when I moved to Madison, and put it on the web in September 2005.  Many of its features will be useful for education, and some are unique to this book, not appearing (as far as I know) anywhere else.  Some parts that you may find especially interesting and educationally useful are described in Tips for Exploring and you can see the overall structure in a Table of Contents.

      And here are some Tips for Using PDF Files.

      But it was "the worst of books" for marketing.  I wrote it for a wide audience, so it could serve as a supplement for any "main textbook" in any first-year course, taught either with or without calculus.  I think the book achieves this educational goal but it was not practical for marketing, mainly because the supplement written specifically for a publisher's own textbook would be "the easy choice" for instructors making decisions about what books to stock in the bookstore (next to the main textbook) and assign as required reading.
      My wide-audience goal was based on optimistic hopes for widespread use and large sales.  In the marketing letter that was an appendix to a cover letter sent to publishers in 1989, I explained that "a stand-alone supplement has a large potential market.  Based on figures from April 1988's Physics Teacher article by Simon George (and from another source) the number of students in the non-calculus and calculus classes is about 250,000 + 200,000 = 450,000 students per year in the United States alone, plus possible international sales.  With a good book and good marketing, it might be possible to gain a part of this market: a 5% share would be 22,500 American students/year."  The potential of this large market interested some publishers in some ways (*), but nothing worked out.  {* Typically, editors were more interested in adapting Physics: Power Tools to make a specialized supplement for their own textbooks. }
      If I had been wise about practical marketing, instead of writing a generalized book I would have contacted publishers in 1987 to ask if the authors of their main textbooks would be interested in using some of my innovative ideas in a collaboration as co-authors.  Well, basically that's what I'm doing now in making this book available on the web.

      Physics: Power Tools for Problem Solving is copyrighted — © 1989 by Craig Rusbult — with all rights reserved, but I'm making it available so the ideas in it can be used, and you can use any parts of it for educational purposes.  If you want to use any parts for commercial purposes, please contact me: craig@chem.wisc.edu