Key Benefit: Written for the non-science major, this book emphasizes modern physics and the scientific process—and engages readers by drawing connections between physics and everyday experience. Hobson takes a conceptual approach, with an appropriate focus on quantitative skills. The Fifth Edition increases coverage of key environmental topics such as global warming and energy, and adds new topics such as momentum. Hobson’s book remains the least expensive book available for readers taking nonmajors physics.

Key Topics: The Way of Science: Experience and Reason, Atoms: The Nature of Things, How Things Move: Galileo Asks the Right Questions, Why Things Move as They Do, Newton’s Universe, Conservation of Energy: You Can’t Get Ahead, Second Law of Thermodynamics: and you Can’t Even Break Even, Light and Electromagnetism, Electromagnetism Radiation and Global Climate Change, The Special Theory of Relativity, The General Theory of Relativity and the New Cosmology, The Quantum Idea, The Quantum Universe, The Nucleus and Radioactivity: An New Force, Fusion and Fission: and a New Energy, The Energy Challenge, Quantum Fields: Relativity Meets the Quantum.

Market: Intended for those interested in learning the basics of physics.