Prelude

Hello students, I hope that you enjoy this free online textbook and find it useful!

This text was made possible by many things: the existence of the Libretexts platform as an avenue through which to curate the necessary resources, the commitment by State Center Community College District to providing students with Open Education Resource (OER) materials, the time and efforts of the Madera Community College OER coordinator and committee to put this possibility in place, and the peer review team who dramatically reduced the number of errors in this text. Without each of these supports in place, this project would not have been possible.

There are many existing online free textbook options available for most courses, and hopefully you are able to find courses where these options are put into place. However, this particular textbook was a bit of a challenge in that there was no existing textbook created for the course. Many of the existing OER materials have historically been created by faculty in systems similar to the California University (CU) system. However, these universities don’t often teach courses which cover the breadth of physical science in Science 1A, and so a free online textbook was not available for this course. In fact, they don’t even have a category for it in the Libretexts library! (at least not yet, but there are many things that historically have fit outside of categories which are now finding categories that fit them, so perhaps one day there will be a category for this little textbook as well.)

Because of the category defying nature of this course, curation of materials for the textbook was a bit more of a challenge than it would have been for a course in a more highly populated field of study such as chemistry or physics. Existing Libretexts resources were curated from bookshelves in physics, chemistry, biology, environmental science, earth science, and psychology.

The most highly adopted materials were in the areas of physics and chemistry, with two sources used extensively: Introduction to Physics (Open Stax), and Introductory Chemistry (CK-12). Each of these texts would be a fine source for an introduction to physics or chemistry, respectively. However, neither of them is designed to cover the breadth of both disciplines within a single semester. And, of course, each text had its own unique stylistic approach. So the curation of this text involved both an adjustment in style to match these two texts in one, as well as a selection of a subsection of each text to highlight in order to adequately cover the breadth of material necessary.

This process was undertaken with the understanding that other instructors would use these materials (or even remix them for their own purposes). When it was difficult to decide which parts of the curated material to highlight, we often defaulted to including more instead of less. It is easier for another instructor to remove or ignore the areas they find less important than to add those materials to the text itself. As such, this text probably covers some material in more depth than is reasonable for coverage in a single semester course. This is particularly true in chapters 6-9, which cover classical physics. The expectation is that the instructor will pick and choose from the materials within these chapters. Hopefully your instructor is communicating which materials within a given chapter to focus on.

I hope that this text is a useful resource for you in understanding the fundamental concepts of physical science.