General Philosphy:

In general texts can be expensive which is sometimes a barrier for students. In the world of open courseware and open source materials there is less and less reason to require a specific text for any class. For these reasons I am personally committed to finding free, or very low cost, texts for my classes.

For this class:

In this class we will be discussing a range of physics topics that are likely to impact your life and community. The text I will be working from is "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" by David Mackay. This is available as a free pdf download though it is a rather large file (the 50 Mb pdf file in the lower right corner of the webpage). If you prefer a paper text you can get it from Amazon for less than $30. I have unpacked all of the individual chapters into smaller pdf files and linked them on this text page if you want to access the material via the net. We will talk in class about different ways to access the text that meet your needs. This is a book about a topic of social and scientific importance written by a very thoughtful physicist at the University of Cambridge.

Please remember that this text will be a primary resource for the material we will be talking about in this class but may not provide you with the answers to every question that comes up during this course. Neither will we cover all the topics in the book.