Understanding the Universe. An introduction to physics and astrophysics, James B. Seaborn (ISBN 978-146126868-0, Springer)

James Seaborn has been teaching an introductory course for many years and this book is the translation into book form of that course. The book is intended for non science majors and teaches physics with an emphasis on topics and applications in astrophysics. I was curious to learn how that approach would work. The result is a physics course at the level of 6th grade high school but applying and illustrating the concepts from the first chapters to astronomy. The first chapters deal with Newton’s laws, uniform circular motion, energy conservation and the universal law of gravitation. This takes up about the first third. Then electromagnetism is covered and the connection is made with atoms and radiation laws, followed by the quantum mechanical view of matter and electromagnetism. This takes up the middle third of the book. The final chapters of the book then go on to deal with stars, how they shine and evolve and then expanding to galaxies and the whole universe. Each chapter has exercises and the ones on for example the laws of motion and conservation of energy had many examples involving rockets instead of balls being thrown which you normally find in other texts. The chapter on circular motion naturally has planetary motion exercises. That part actually works quite well in the sense that the exercises are quite practical. You could actually imagine wanting to calculate how fast your rocket is flying or how high it will get once all fuel is burnt. Or trying to figure out how far a planet or comet is away from the sun based on its period and Kepler’s laws. The exercises are not too difficult and no advanced mathematics is required, not even integration. Formulas are introduced as needed but their mathematical derivation is not rigorously covered. For the early chapters on mechanics and light and matter the approach works quite well, for the final chapters on stellar evolution I found the coverage of the material quite superficial, it didn’t feel like much of the underlying physics was still being conveyed. This is a difficult book to place. Apart from the students following this kind of course I don’t see a big audience. I would suspect most people looking for a popular science book will find too little story and too many formulas and (the horror) problems to solve. You actually need a calculator for many of the exercises as the numbers given are often decimals so not easy to calculate with by heart or by hand. For students looking for a real physics text the level is not advanced enough. But part of the book could actually work very well for 5th and 6th grade high school students. I think the approach makes at least some concepts more tangible and exiting for the not so interested high school kids. Having kids in high school myself that sometimes have difficulty understanding or remembering what the physics teacher told them in class I found this book an interesting source to draw examples and exercises from to illustrate some concepts in action. Typical to Springer publications it is not cheap but well laid out and on quality paper. Considering the price I would have expected the few pictures in the book to have been of better quality. But this is only a cosmetic issue as the pictures are not essential to understand what is written and there are only a handful of pictures in the book. What did surprise me is how fast I got through the book. I got through the 300 pages in about 10 days although I only went through 150 of the exercises of the first 5 chapters so far. The rest is on my to do list.