Benjamin Crowell
Personal Information
Description
Benjamin Crowell teaches physics at Fullerton College, a community college in southern California. he comes fully equipped with a PhD in physics from Yale, but I more fondly remember my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley. Source: lightandmatter.com
Books
Electricity and magnetism
Discusses various aspects of electricity and magnetism, including static electricity, electrons, lightning, batteries, cells, conductors, insulators, circuits, magnets, electromagnets, electric motors, and more.
Special Relativity
This a textbook on special relativity, aimed at undergraduates who have already completed a freshman survey course. The treatment of electromagnetism assumes previous exposure to Maxwell's equations in integral form, but no knowledge of vector calculus.
Mechanics
Relativity for Poets
This is a set of lecture notes for the course Relativity for Poets at Fullerton College. It's a nonmathematical presentation of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, including a brief treatment of cosmology.
Problems in Introductory Physics
This book is a collection of homework problems for use in an introductory physics course. It is a work in progress, currently complete through first-semester mechanics.
General Relativity
This is a textbook on general relativity for upper-division undergraduates majoring in physics, at roughly the same level as Rindler's Essential Relativity or Hartle's Gravity. The book is meant to be especially well adapted for self-study, and answers are given in the back of the book for almost all the problems. The ratio of conceptual to mathematical problems is higher than in most books. The notational system emphasized most strongly is coordinate-free abstract index notation. Knowledge of first-year calculus and lower-division mechanics and electromagnetism is assumed. Differential equations, linear algebra, and vector calculus are used in various spots, and although it would not be too hard to skip over those spots while understanding the general ideas, the reality is that general relativity is a subject in which a fairly high degree of mathematical maturity will be useful. Special relativity is introduced from scratch, but it will be very helpful to have a thorough previous knowledge of SR, at the level of a book such as Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics or my own text Special Relativity.
Newtonian Physics
You are reading the first volume of the Light and Matter series of introductory physics textbooks, and as implied by its title, the story line of the series is built around light and matter: how they behave, how they are different from each other, and, at the end of the story, how they turn out to be similar in some very bizarre ways.
