This book is the product of more than half a century of leadership and innovation in physics education. When the first edition of University Physics by Francis W. Sears and Mark W. Zemansky was published in 1949, it was revolutionary among calculus-based physics textbooks in its emphasis on the fundamental principles of physics and how to apply them. The success of University Physics with generations of (several million) students and educators around the world is a testament to the merits of this approach and to the many innovations it has introduced subsequently.
In preparing this First Australian SI edition, our aim was to create a text that is the future of Physics Education in Australia. We have further enhanced and developed University Physics to assimilate the best ideas from education research with enhanced problem-solving instruction, pioneering visual and conceptual pedagogy, the first systematically enhanced problems, and the most pedagogically proven and widely used online homework and tutorial system in the world, Mastering Physics.
