Written for the non-science major, this text emphasizes modern physics and the scientific process-and engages students 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 text remains the least expensive textbook available for students taking nonmajors physics.

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 QuantumMarket: Intended for those interested in learning the basics of physics

Everybody has heard that we live in a world made of atoms. But far more fundamentally, we live in a universe made of quanta. Many things are not made of atoms: light, radio waves, electric current, magnetic fields, Earth's gravitational field, not to mention exotica such a neutron stars, black holes, dark energy, and dark matter. But everything, including atoms, is made of highly unified or "coherent" bundles of energy called "quanta" that (like everything else) obey certain rules. In the case of the quantum, these rules are called "quantum physics." This is a book about quanta and their unexpected, some would say peculiar, behavior-tales, if you will, of the quantum. The quantum has developed the reputation of being capricious, bewildering, even impossible to understand. The peculiar habits of quanta are certainly not what we would have expected to find at the foundation of physical reality, but these habits are not necessarily bewildering and not at all impossible or paradoxical. This book explains those habits-the quantum rules-in everyday language, without mathematics or unnecessary technicalities. While most popular books about quantum physics follow the topic's scientific history from 1900 to today, this book follows the phenomena: wave-particle duality, fundamental randomness, quantum states, superpositions (being in two places at once), entanglement, non-locality, Schrodinger's cat, and quantum jumps, and presents the history and the scientists only to the extent that they illuminate the phenomena.