free physics textbooks

Ben Crowell of Fullerton College, CA, has made his Light and Matter introductory physics text sequence (for life-science students, with optional calculus) freely available for down­load under the Creative Commons License from http://www.lightandmatter.com. My students are now reading from the Optics text from that set, a topic not treated in our class text. Others in that series include Newtonian Physics, Conservation Laws, Vibrations and Waves, Electricity and Magnetism, and The Modern Revolution in Physics. Crowell also provides instructor's resource materials and two other works based on conservation laws from his site.

The classic and historically important text Practical Physics (1922) by Robert Millikan and Henry Gale is available from the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/practicalphysics00millrich, and was reviewed online by John Denker in PHYS-L at https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/archives (search on Gale). Some 1000 freely downloadable electronic texts and out-of-copyright facsimiles of physics texts are now online at http://www.archive.org (search the word physics and select “texts” as media type), including many classics and much dated mate­rial.

Posted to PHYS-L by John S. Denker, jsd@av8n.com, with com­ments by several Phys-L contributors