Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality Paperback – September 5, 2002

Best book for people like me that need visual representations to learn easier....

Every so often I pick up a book that I wish I read 10 years ago. Feynman's Lectures on Physics and Van Hess's Thermodynamics are among these, as well as Polya's How To Solve It for those more mathematically inclined. These would have certainly saved me from much confusion during my college engineering curriculum, for they focus on teaching the material to the reader, as opposed to masking it in the equations of a textbook. Some lucky folks have the ability to glance at equations and immediately grasp their meaning; for the other 99.99% of us, an intuitive explanation replete with real-world analogies helps to bring the meaning to life.With a presentation both unique and entertaining, Lewis Carroll Epstein's Thinking Physics has certainly claimed a rightful seat at the roundtable of wonderful didactic books. Every page poses a question that challenges the reader on his view of the physical world, and nearly every answer tears down the fallacies of his intuition. Socrates would have been proud of the format, with each new question expanding on concepts developed in earlier answers. One of the 1-star reviews mentioned a lack of organization. This criticism completely misses the point. It is NOT a textbook, so "obviously" it will lack some of the rigorous development of concepts and precise organization that you would expect in a physics text. It IS a popular physics book with lots of cartoony pictures that a kid in elementary school could both enjoy and understand. At the same time, the insights will help build anyone's physics intuition, regardless of age. I read this book when I was 30. I have since started going through problems in Kleppner and Kolenkow and some other more advanced texts, and I really think this book helped.

Good book. Some of the explanations need re-writing as a few are not explained well enough. But overall, a good book to begin to understand physics for any beginner, or young learner. It has a lot of interesting physics examples. I didn't give it 5 stars because of several reasons. One is the authors attitude throughout the book which bleeds through a bit too much. Another reason is that some of the example situations could have been better, and a few had poor explanations which were lacking. But there is so much god here that these negatives are minor enough.

An excellent low-math book that covers many everyday concepts in physics, allows anyone to think through everyday problems and gain experience in thinking without doing calculations or sitting through endless ball-rolling-down-ramp labs. It shows ways that physicists and scientifically literate people think about physics problems in general terms. I've seen it on many shelves- grad students, postdocs and professors, teaching or not, since my undergrad days 25 years ago , alongside Art of Electronics, Jackson, Halliday/Resnik , and a book of integrals. Fine for junior- and high school students, and even younger with parental guidance. Many kids have sensible questions about why e.g. a bike stays up or who you really wouldn't want to run into on a football field, and the answers to them, and nice sketches too.

Really nice book

Just a wonderful book for engineers and English majors alike. This is one of those texts that teaches you how to think; in this case like a physicist. We see that what so often seems simple and obvious is not. It looks at problems conceptually and makes us reduce a problem to the bare bones. Very little math required. the concepts of work, force, energy, velocity, acceleration, weight, mass, inertia, impulse, momentum and time are explored in a lucid and playful manner using ordinary language. My girlfriend and I discussed a problem for five hours as we drove to San Francisco. The time flew. I can't recommend it enough. Truly profound.

This is a great book for Physics concepts. I want to address the rant included at the end. Mr. Epstein is brilliant, but somewhere along the line he decided his pursuits outweigh everyone else's and rails against everyone, but most of all the government stealing all of our hard earned money and it being wasted. Yet he paradoxically includes a couple of letters to the very same beurocrats he rails against hoping for some assistance in receiving compensation for intellectual property stolen from him. Curiously enough, he did not illustrate the book himself and doesn't actually credit the illustrator either. It seems as though he has become part of the problem he is complaining about.That aside, the physics part of the book is fantastic and is beautifully reasoned and specifically designed to make complicated concepts easy to understand.

I used to use this as a supplementary text book when I taught high school science - now using to supplement home schooling for 4th and 6th graders. Questions are thought provoking, lead to great concepts teaching. Unbelievable how this book can be used from 4th grade to high school/college and be appropriate for all. If you really want a fundamental understanding of how things actually work with clever intriguing problems that will hook you in - this book can not be beat.