HELPING THE FREE PHYSICS TEXTBOOK

DonationsOne-minute helpTwenty-minute helpRewards and prizesTranslation helpDaisy and epub helpList of sponsors

 
Donations

Please donate to the charitable non-profit association that organizes the publication, the Motion Mountain Physikverein. Your donation, however small, is welcome! It will be used to improve the book and its distribution. To donate, click here. Thank you in advance, also in the name of all readers!

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One-minute help

You can help this project in several ways:

• tell or email your friends about the text,
• contribute misprints or suggestions to the feedback wiki or, better, via email to christoph@motionmountain.net,
• suggest good videos for the 'fascinating video' page,
• mention the text in Facebook,
• twitter about it, or
• add the site to your favourite social bookmarking services with Shareomatic.

To do more, read on.

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Twenty-minute help

Do you want to actively support the spread of free physics education across the continents? The following contributions would be particularly welcome, and I offer prizes for them and for a number of other ones, as explained on the prize challenge page:

• Take a picture of a striking moving phenomenon and send it in.
• Earn substantial prizes by solving the challenges on the page about prize challenges.
• Propose solutions to challenges marked as "ny".
• Take and send in pictures about striking examples of biological motion.
• Find a reference for the difficulties encountered when trying to observe classical tachyons.
• Write an article about the site in a newspaper or journal.
• Supply photos and graphics for wave interference, polarization, diffraction, refraction, wave damping, and wave dispersion.
• Take and send in a photograph of how a candle flame reacts to a rubbed comb or, better, of how it splits in a high electric field.
• Send in a quality CAD drawing of a Foucault gyroscope.
• Provide figures of the most important topological defects: twirls, hedgehogs, etc.
• Supply details on the mathematics of tree growth: the laws about their proportions, the height of their trunks, the significance of the principle of minimum effort, etc.
• Mail in a 'welcome' page in your mother language, translating this English page. (Include the the word 'welcome' and the date. If you can, include the meta tags in the HTML code.)

If you can help on any of these topics or you think some issue not included in the text should be added, suggest it in the wiki or email me at christoph@motionmountain.net; I'll consider it for the next edition. All help is welcome.

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Rewards and prizes

For extensive help or good feedback on how to improve the text, on the wiki or via mail, I will send you a free paper copy and add your name in the text. I also offer larger prizes for various specific contributions, as explained on the prize challenge page.

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Translation help

If you want to help in translating parts of the text into Spanish, Italian, German, French or any other language, click here for details on how to do it and then let me know. I will organize a special prize for such help.

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Daisy and epub help

If you can help to transform the latex files into html, and then into daisy or epub format, let me know. I will organize a special prize for such help.

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Gold sponsors

• From 2006 to 2010, Benoît Clénet translated the first three volumes, over 1000 pages, into the French language. Benoît, thank you very much for this fantastic effort! (Benoît Clénet also translated into French the book À la recherche de la matière noire by Robert Sanders.)
• Since Mai 2007, this project is supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Edition 21 was the first result of their support.
• Since 2010, the website of the project receives non-monetary philantropic support.

Silver sponsors

• Antonio Martos produced two wonderful animations about the belt trick.

Bronze sponsors

• The physics tutors at Varsity Tutors made a donation in 2011.
• The physics resources department at Teachable.net made a donation in 2011.
• Alessandro Gori translated the chapter on special relativity into the Italian language.
• José Manuel López López translated the chapter on special relativity into the Spanish language.
• Vincent Isoz with OWS.ch and Evert Meulie have provided free pdf download of the book from 2005 to 2008.
• the Digital City of Eindhoven provides free html web hosting since 1997.
• Marco Fulle, Roberto Carniel and Jürg Alean provided volcano images from www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli.
• Gilles Régnier provided tide photographs from his site www.gillesregnier.com.
• Shinywhitebox provided a copy of its IShowU screen capture software for animations.
• Daugerresearch provided a copy of its Atom in a Box software to visualize atomic orbitals.
• Klaus Jost provided a photograph of a white shark from his website www.jostimages.com.
• Lucas Barbosa and José Antonio Díaz Navas produced animations specifically for this text.
• Two figures from www.messmittelonline.de have been included by kind permission.
• Luca Gastaldi, Antonio Martos and Ulrich Kolberg produced images specifically for this text.
• Rüdiger Paschotta provided images from his Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology found at www.rp-photonics.com/encyclopedia.html.
• Content and editing help came in many points from Frank Sweetser, and also from Mikael Johansson, Bruno Barberi Gnecco, Lothar Beyer, including the numerous improvements by Bert Sierra, the detailed suggestions by Claudio Farinati, the many improvements by Eric Sheldon, the advice of Andrew Young, the continuous help and advice of Jonatan Kelu, the corrections of Elmar Bartel, and in particular the extensive, passionate and conscientious help of Adrian Kubala.
• Heiko Oberdiek, Michael Zedler, Achim Blumensath and Donald Arseneau helped extensively with fonts and typesetting.
• Ulrich Dirr and Johannes Küster provided professional typographic consulting.
• Bildhaft provided web design.
• My wife Britta provided suggestions and constant support.

Iron sponsors

Donations to our non-profit organisation: SchoolTutoring Academy provided a donation in support of better physics education.
Donations were also provided by Robrecht De Rouck, Virginia Lira and Liliana Alonso and a number of other donors that prefer to be unnamed.

Content: Numerous readers have provided material for this text: a warm thank-you to every one of them. Important material was provided by Bert Peeters, Anna Wierzbicka, William Beaty, Jim Carr, John Merrit, John Baez, Frank DiFilippo, Jonathan Scott, Jon Thaler, Luca Bombelli, Douglas Singleton, George McQuarry, Tilman Hausherr, Brian Oberquell, Peer Zalm, Martin van der Mark, Vladimir Surdin, Julia Simon, Antonio Fermani, Don Page, Stephen Haley, Peter Mayr, Allan Hayes, Igor Ivanov, Doug Renselle, Wim de Muynck, Steve Carlip, Tom Bruce, Ryan Budney, Gary Ruben, Chris Hillman, Olivier Glassey, Jochen Greiner, squark, Martin Hardcastle, Mark Biggar, Pavel Kuzin, Douglas Brebner, Luciano Lombardi, Franco Bagnoli, Lukas Fabian Moser, Dejan Corovic, Steve Carlip, Corrado Massa, Tom Helmond, Gary Gibbons, Heinrich Neumaier, Peter Brown, Paul Vannoni, John Haber, Saverio Pascazio, Klaus Finkenzeller, Leo Volin, Jeff Aronson, Roggie Boone, Lawrence Tuppen, Quentin David Jones, Arnaldo Uguzzoni, Frans van Nieuwpoort, Alan Mahoney, Britta Schiller, Petr Danecek, Ingo Thies, Vitaliy Solomatin, Carl Offner, Nuno Proença, Elena Colazingari, Paula Henderson, Daniel Darre, Wolfgang Rankl, John Heumann, Joseph Kiss, Martha Weiss, Antonio González, Antonio Martos, John Heumann, André Slabber, Ferdinand Bautista, Zoltán Gácsi, Pat Furrie, Michael Reppisch, Enrico Pasi, Thomas Köppe, Martin Rivas, Herman Beeksma, Tom Helmond, John Brandes, Vlad Tarko, Nadia Murillo, Ciprian Dobra, Romano Perini, Harald van Lintel, Andrea Conti, François Belfort, Dirk Van de Moortel, Heinrich Neumaier, Jaroslaw Królikowski, John Dahlman, Fathi Namouni, Paul Townsend, Sergei Emelin, Freeman Dyson, S.R.Madhu Rao, David Parks, Jürgen Janek, Daniel Huber, Alfons Buchmann, William Purves, Pietro Redondi, Sergei Kopeikin, Helmut Wunderling, Frank Sweetser, plus a number of people who chose to remain unnamed.

Animations and films: All included films are copyrighted; they were kindly provided by Martin Elsässer, Jarmo Hietarinta, Lim Tee Tai, Thomas Weiland, Daniel Schroeder, Roger Sabbadini, Dean Dauger, Greg Egan, Jake Socha, Lucas Barbosa, José Antonio Díaz Navas and Ute Kraus.

Photographs: Almost all photographs, in total more than 200, shown in the text and on the website are copyrighted; permission to use them has been kindly provided by each copyright holder. The names are mentioned below each picture, in the index of names, and on the picture credit page in the appendix.

Software: The textbook was typeset using its own LaTeX class file, the MinionPro package and over 60 existing LaTeX packages, using Gerben Wierda's gwtex distribution and Andrew Trevorrow's OzTeX. Numerous limitations and bugs in the tex distribution, in LaTeX, in LaTeX packages, in programming editors, and even in Adobe Acrobat had to be corrected to typeset the text. The software tools were refined with the repeated and valuable support of Donald Arseneau; help came also from Ulrike Fischer, Piet van Oostrum, Gerben Wierda, Klaus Böhncke, Craig Upright, Herbert Voss, Andrew Trevorrow, Danie Els, Sebastian Rahtz, Don Story, Vincent Darley, Johan Linde, Joseph Hertzlinger, Rick Zaccone, John Warkentin, Ulrich Diez, Uwe Siart, Will Robertson, Joseph Wright, Enrico Gregorio, Rolf Niepraschk, Alexander Grahn and Michael Zedler. The beautiful Minion math fonts are those of Johannes Küster; they are found at Typoma.

Website: The programming of the html pages owes much to the help of Greg Smith and Michael Beretka. Chris Garbers helped for the wiki and many other issues. Ipad tests are due to Rick Shoal. The website uses several PHP scripts from the PHPJunkyard and from Phil Connell. Translations of the html pages are due to Daniel Gutmanas, Romano Perini, Matous Ringel, Marek Gajdos, Irwan Prasetya Gunawan, Jarosław Królikowski, Johnny Chadda, Martin Clausen, Dimitar Genchev, Ryan, Kasper Olsen, Helga Trapp, Thomas Wahlstrøm, Gorka Ochoa, Ambrož Demšar, Roman Beslik, Paul Townsend, Kristjan Kannike, Hirooka Megumi, Mahdi Samadzad and Rahele Mashhadiebrahim.

Colour sponsors

The many readers who sent feedback, suggestions and criticism via mail or via the feedback wiki helped making this text into what it is today. Thank you for the support! You add the colour to this project.

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