Motion Mountain - The Adventure of Physics is downloaded over 40 000 times per year. If other sites are included, the number is even higher, though by an unknown amount. This number puts it among the most widely read physics texts across the world.
Recommendations to read the Motion Mountain
textbook – none (except one) triggered or requested by the
author:
- many college and university students, such as Jaime, who writes "Motion Mountain is probably the biggest, most professional freely available and published online textbook",
- numerous physics teachers in schools, universities and private institutions across the world,
- dozens of readers who were so captivated that they spent many months of their lives to read every single line of the text,
- the hundreds of readers who praised it in the guestbook and on other websites,
- the numerous sponsors, listed here, who provided donations to this project,
- the nomination, in 2010, for an important science popularization prize,
- numerous university physics departments across the continents,
- fellow physics textbook authors,
- dozens of blogs, too numerous to mention here,
- the article How to learn physics at home, which advises reading Motion Mountain as one of four steps to do so,
- the California Learning Resource Network, who is promoting it to physics teachers since 2010 (with input from Christoph Schiller),
- the influential blog cinghiale digitale, who in 2010 called it "splendid",
- the TeX User Group, who used it in its 2010 calendar that presents one example of beautiful typesetting every month,
- the influential blog by Stephen Downes, who in 2008 called it a "gem",
- the influential Cool Tools blog by Kevin Kelly, who in 2008 called it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece",
- the Christmas 2007 column of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, where John Baez, from the University of California at Riverside, advised to use it in case "you're dying to learn physics, but don't know where to start" and called it a "feast of ideas - romantic, wildly ambitious, and still not finished",
- a 2007 article in Heise online, who called it a "liebevoll gemachtes Liebhaberprojekt" (a project made with love by an enthusiast),
- the Physical Sciences Ressource Center of the American Association of Physics Teachers, where it was a featured site in 2007,
- the well-known Learnoutloud blog, where in 2006 Jonathan Bischke called it "amazing" and put it among the six best ways to learn physics for free,
- the EU-funded European Gateway to Science Education, which is distributing the text to science teachers, science communicators and pupils since 2006,
- the Stingyscholar
website, which awarded the text the beggin-and-choosin award for
"best textbook" in 2005:
- awards and articles from numerous science and education websites,
among them:
- the famous Boingboing blog, where Cory Doctorow wrote in 2005 that it is "perfect to dip into when you have a particular subject you want to get up to speed on",
- a 2005 article in the French Onirik e-zine, where David Lapetina called it "une mine d'or" (a gold mine),
- the Return of Whatever podcast in 2005,
- NASA's emlib, now hosted at IEEE,
- the persons who organized a DoS attack against it because Christoph Schiller refused to support antisemitism (this is the reason for the captcha),
- various Wikipedia articles in various languages that cite it as reference,
- an article in The Physics Teacher,
- an article in the July 2004 edition of Physics Education,
- a short article in Physikalische Blätter, the journal of the German physical society,
- a deeply fanatic reader who is so fascinated by the text that he is spending a lot of his time reading it and writing hate reviews with mistaken or no arguments all over the internet, always under a different name, emulating the man who went to a museum for many months to see Barnett Newman's painting 'Cathedra', until he finally damaged the painting with a knife,
- three governments: this site is proud to have been repeatedly blocked by the totalitarian governments of Tibet, mainland China and Myanmar. But the site is also unavailable in North Corea, Chad, the Central African Republic and almost unavailable in various other countries whose governments do not respect human rights. As a result of the lack of human rights, such countries have few teachers, technicians, scientists and engineers, and therefore have little chance to achieve decent standards of living.
Some reader feedback from the guestbook,
emails to the author, and the internet:
- "Motion Mountain is by far the best open textbook I’ve come across." - Wynn Williamson
- "Thanks for this treasure." - Andres Nunez
- [The theory of] "evolution is not science; why do you support it?" - Fred Smith
- "Astrology is correct; your negative remarks about it should be changed!" - Wiebke van Leeuwen
- "Probably the most interesting physics book you will ever see." - Art Ruff
- "This book is absolutely phenomenal." - Didi Conimbriga
The textbook has been cited in:
- various physics research papers, such as: Jorge G Russo and Paul K Townsend, Relativistic kinematics and stationary motions, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42, 445402 (2009); P Facchi and S Pascazio, Quantum Zeno dynamics: mathematical and physical aspects, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 41, 493001 (2008); E Minguzzi, Classical aspects of lightlike dimensional reduction, Class. Quantum Grav. 23, 7085 (2006); Harald van Lintel et al., The rod and hole paradox re-examined, Eur. J. Phys. 26, 19-23 (2005);
- several physics theses;
- various studies on education research, such as: B Assefa et al., Ethiopian Journal of Education and Sciences, 3, 71-80 (2008); a US-American study on electronic textbooks; a study on educational software by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
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