Halliday Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics, 11th Edition

JEARL WALKER, professor of physics at Cleveland State University, received his BS in physics from MIT in 1967 and his Ph.D. in physics from University of Maryland in 1973. His book The Flying Circus of Physics was first published 41 years ago and was translated into at least 10 languages. The second edition was published in 2006 and is still being translated into other languages. For 16 years, he toured his Flying Circus talk throughout the U.S. and Canada, introducing such physics stunts as the bed-of-nails demonstration and the walking-on-hot-coals demonstration to countless physics teachers, who then proceeded to hurt themselves when they repeated the stunts in their own classrooms. These talks led to his PBS television series Kinetic Karnival that was rerun nationally for years and which landed him a local Emmy, now proudly displayed in his first-floor bathroom. Since then, he was on the Canadian radio show Quirks and Quarks weekly for 11 years and on the Discovery Channel Canada show Daily Planet numerous times.

During his 13 years with Scientific American magazine, he wrote 152 articles for “The Amateur Scientist” section, which were translated into at least 9 languages worldwide and had over 2 million readers each month. His topics ranged from the physics of judo to the physics of béarnaise sauce and lemon meringue pies.

In 1990, he took over the Fundamentals of Physics, the textbook he used in his first year at MIT, from David Halliday and Robert Resnick. Since then he has published seven editions of the book (which have appeared in 16 translations) and sold over a million copies in North America and around three to four million copies worldwide. He has lost count of the number of times he has been on television and radio and interviewed for newspapers and magazines; however, he clearly remembers the 20 minutes he spent performing on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson where he stuck his fingers into molten lead without losing any of them to the great relief of his mother who was at home watching the show.

BRAD TREES is the Richardson-Linebaugh Professor of Physics at Ohio Wesleyan University. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan in 1986. He received his MS (1989) and Ph.D. (1993) from Ohio State University. He was chosen by Ohio Magazine as one of the top 100 university teachers in Ohio in 2003.

He joins this project as a contributor for the first time with this course revision. His imaginative and stimulating simulations and simulation-related question content and feedback are a fantastic addition to the course.