"One of Choice's Compilation of Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates for 2010-2011"

"'Physics for Future Presidents' is a course, yes (with the professor's best seller, and soon its sequel, serving as textbook), but it is really more a tour de force. Richard A. Muller presents an astonishing amount of information on atoms, antimatter and other subjects. But since these are actual lectures, recorded in a hall on the Berkeley campus. . . . It's all highly entertaining and educational, although it's hard to imagine being able to absorb it all. The course is geared for nonscientists, billed as being long on concepts and short on math, and covers topics like radioactivity, climate change and waves of all kinds. Yet it doesn't spare details."---Henry Fountain, New York Times

"[I]t's a great textbook for a physics course for non-scientists, and there's plenty of stuff in there to interest scientists as well."---Brian Clegg, Popular Science

"Muller does a very good job of comprehensively describing the physics base of the technological infrastructure of our social world." ― Choice

"[T]his handsome volume merits a very wide readership if we are to make the most of it and of everything else for that matter."---Arthur B. Shostak, European Legacy

Physics for future world leaders

Physics and Technology for Future Presidents contains the essential physics that students need in order to understand today's core science and technology issues, and to become the next generation of world leaders. From the physics of energy to climate change, and from spy technology to quantum computers, this is the only textbook to focus on the modern physics affecting the decisions of political leaders and CEOs and, consequently, the lives of every citizen. How practical are alternative energy sources? Can satellites really read license plates from space? What is the quantum physics behind iPods and supermarket scanners? And how much should we fear a terrorist nuke? This lively book empowers students possessing any level of scientific background with the tools they need to make informed decisions and to argue their views persuasively with anyone―expert or otherwise.

Based on Richard Muller's renowned course at Berkeley, the book explores critical physics topics: energy and power, atoms and heat, gravity and space, nuclei and radioactivity, chain reactions and atomic bombs, electricity and magnetism, waves, light, invisible light, climate change, quantum physics, and relativity. Muller engages readers through many intriguing examples, helpful facts to remember, a fun-to-read text, and an emphasis on real-world problems rather than mathematical computation. He includes chapter summaries, essay and discussion questions, Internet research topics, and handy tips for instructors to make the classroom experience more rewarding.

Accessible and entertaining, Physics and Technology for Future Presidents gives students the scientific fluency they need to become well-rounded leaders in a world driven by science and technology.

A restricted instructor's manual is available to teachers. Contact the publisher for more information.

Leading universities that have adopted this book include:

• Harvard
• Purdue
• Rice University
• University of Chicago
• Sarah Lawrence College
• Notre Dame
• Wellesley
• Wesleyan
• University of Colorado
• Northwestern
• Washington University in St. Louis
• University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
• Fordham
• University of Miami
• George Washington University

"Modern science and technology have the power to shape the world we live in, for good or for evil. Muller, himself a brilliant, creative scientist, has distilled the most important scientific principles that define our choices, and has presented them clearly and objectively. To make wise decisions, not only future presidents, but future business and community leaders, and thoughtful citizens generally, need the information in this book."―Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize―winning physicist

"Richard Muller has written an amazing and very entertaining book, not only for future presidents but for just about everyone else. It's written in a nonmathematical style, but includes tidbits that will amaze even working physicists. This is a great book that should be read by everyone."―David Goodstein, California Institute of Technology

"Anyone who aspires to be president (of any enlightened organization)―or for that matter, anyone who would like to be led by an informed president―should read this book. Extraterrestrials would surely be amazed that the citizens of the most powerful country on earth routinely elect presidents who proudly profess to know nothing about science and technology. We can only dream that one day presidential debates will include a quiz based on this book."―A. Zee, author of Fearful Symmetry

"Clear, inviting, and humorous, this is the first nonquantitative book I've seen that covers all the topics of physics. The introduction of current social and political issues is excellent. Students will want to read this book from cover to cover. It could increase scientific literacy significantly."―Mark Oreglia, University of Chicago

"Physics and Technology for Future Presidents provides a new answer to an old problem: how to teach physics to nontechnical students. Richard Muller does not 'dumb down' the technical aspects of physics; he skips them altogether and focuses on physics results rather than methods. Fun to read and accessible to general readers, this book presents a lot of interesting physics facts."―Vadim Kaplunovsky, University of Texas, Austin

"Modern science and technology have the power to shape the world we live in, for good or for evil. Muller, himself a brilliant, creative scientist, has distilled the most important scientific principles that define our choices, and has presented them clearly and objectively. To make wise decisions, not only future presidents, but future business and community leaders, and thoughtful citizens generally, need the information in this book."--Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize--winning physicist

"Richard Muller has written an amazing and very entertaining book, not only for future presidents but for just about everyone else. It's written in a nonmathematical style, but includes tidbits that will amaze even working physicists. This is a great book that should be read by everyone."--David Goodstein, California Institute of Technology

"Anyone who aspires to be president (of any enlightened organization)--or for that matter, anyone who would like to be led by an informed president--should read this book. Extraterrestrials would surely be amazed that the citizens of the most powerful country on earth routinely elect presidents who proudly profess to know nothing about science and technology. We can only dream that one day presidential debates will include a quiz based on this book."--A. Zee, author ofFearful Symmetry

"Clear, inviting, and humorous, this is the first nonquantitative book I've seen that covers all the topics of physics. The introduction of current social and political issues is excellent. Students will want to read this book from cover to cover. It could increase scientific literacy significantly."--Mark Oreglia, University of Chicago

"Physics and Technology for Future Presidents provides a new answer to an old problem: how to teach physics to nontechnical students. Richard Muller does not 'dumb down' the technical aspects of physics; he skips them altogether and focuses on physics results rather than methods. Fun to read and accessible to general readers, this book presents a lot of interesting physics facts."--Vadim Kaplunovsky, University of Texas, Austin

Richard A. Muller is professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a past winner of the MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author of Nemesis (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) and Physics for Future Presidents (Norton).

Physics and Technology for Future Presidents

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

At the end of the Cretaceous period, the golden age of dinosaurs, an asteroid or comet about 10 miles in diameter headed directly towards the Earth with a velocity of about 20 miles per second, over ten times faster than our speediest bullets. Many such large objects may have come close to the Earth, but this was the one that finally hit. It hardly noticed the air as it plunged through the atmosphere in a fraction of a second, momentarily leaving a trail of vacuum behind it. It hit the Earth with such force that it and the rock near it were suddenly heated to a temperature of over a million degrees Centigrade, several hundred times hotter than the surface of the sun. Asteroid, rock, and water (if it hit in the ocean) were instantly vaporized. The energy released in the explosion was greater than that of a hundred million megatons of TNT, 100 teratons, more than ten thousand times greater than the total U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.... Before a minute had passed, the expanding crater was 60 miles across and 20 miles deep. It would soon grow even larger. Hot vaporized material from the impact had already blasted its way out through most of the atmosphere to an altitude of 15 miles. Material that a moment earlier had been glowing plasma was beginning to cool and condense into dust and rock that would be spread worldwide. -from Richard A. Muller, Nemesis

Few people are surprised by the fact that an asteroid the size of Mount Everest could do a lot of damage when it hits the Earth. And it is not really surprising that such bodies are out there (figure 1.1). The danger has been the subject of many movies, including Deep Impact, Meteor, and Armageddon. Asteroids and comets frequently come close to the Earth. Every few years, we see a newspaper headline about a "near miss" in which an object misses the Earth by "only a few million miles." That is hardly a near miss. The radius of the Earth is about 4000 miles. So a miss by, say, four million miles would be a miss by a thousand Earth radii. Hitting the Earth is comparable to hitting an ant on a dartboard.

Although the probability of an asteroid impact during your lifetime is small, the consequences could be huge, with millions or maybe even billions of people killed. For this reason, the U.S. government continues to sponsor both asteroid searches, to identify potential impactors, and research into ways to deflect or destroy such bodies.

But why should an asteroid impact cause an explosion? The asteroid was made of rock, not dynamite. And why would it cause such a big explosion? But then what is an explosion, after all?

Explosions and Energy

An explosion occurs when a great deal of stored energy is suddenly converted to heat in a confined space. This is true for a grenade, an atomic bomb, or an asteroid hitting the Earth. The heat is enough to vaporize the matter, turning it into an extremely hot gas. Such a gas has enormous pressure-that is, it puts a great force on everything that surrounds it. Nothing is strong enough to resist this pressure, so the gas expands rapidly and pushes anything near it out of the way. The flying debris is what does the damage in an explosion. It doesn't matter what the original form of the energy is-it could be kinetic energy (the result of motion), like the energy of the asteroid, or chemical energy, like the energy in the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is the rapid conversion of this energy to heat that is at the heart of most explosions.

You may have noticed that I used a lot of common terms in the preceding paragraph that I didn't explain. Words such as energy and heat have everyday meanings, but they also have precise meanings when used in physics. Physics can be derived in a deductive way, just like geometry, but it is hard to learn in that manner. So our approach will be to start with intuitive definitions and then make them more precise as we delve deeper into the physics. Here are some beginning definitions that you may find helpful. The precise meanings of these definitions will become clearer over the next three chapters.

Definitions (Don't Memorize)

Energy is the ability to do work. (Work is defined numerically as the magnitude of a force multiplied by the distance that the force moves in the direction of the force.) Alternative definition for energy: anything that can be turned into heat.

Heat is something that raises the temperature of a material, as measured by a thermometer. (It will turn out that heat is actually the microscopic energy of motion of vibrating molecules.)

These definitions sound great to the professional physicist, but they might be somewhat mysterious to you. They don't really help much since they involve other concepts (work, force, energy of motion) that you may not precisely understand. I'll talk more about all these concepts in the coming pages. In fact, it is very difficult to understand the concept of energy just from the definitions alone. Trying to do so is like trying to learn a foreign language by memorizing a dictionary. So be patient. I'll give lots of examples, and those will help you to feel your way into this subject. Rather than read this chapter slowly, I recommend that you read it quickly, and more than once. You learn physics by iteration-that is, by going over the same material many times. Each time you do that, the material makes a little more sense. That's also the best way to learn a foreign language: total immersion. So don't worry about understanding things just yet. Just keep on reading.

Amount of Energy

Guess: How much energy is there in a pound of an explosive, such as dynamite or TNT, compared to, say, a pound of chocolate chip cookies? Don't read any more until you've made your guess.

Here's the answer: The chocolate chip cookies have the greater energy. Not only that, but the energy is much greater-eight times greater in the cookies than in TNT! That fact surprises nearly everybody, including many physics professors. Try it out on some of your friends who are physics majors.

How can it be? Isn't TNT famous for the energy it releases? We'll resolve this paradox in a moment. First, let's list the energies in various different things. There are a lot more surprises coming, and if you are investing in a company, or running the U.S. government, it is important that you know many of these facts.

To make the comparisons, let's consider the amount of energy in 1 gram of various materials. (A gram is the weight of a cubic centimeter of water; a penny weighs 3 grams, and there are 454 grams in a pound.) I'll give the energy in several units: the Calorie, the calorie, the watt-hour, and the kilowatt-hour.

CALORIE

The unit you might feel most familiar with is the Calorie. That's the famous "food calorie" used in dieting. It is the one that appears on the labels of food packages. A chocolate chip ( just the chip, not the whole cookie) contains about 3 Calories. A 12-ounce can of Coca Cola has about 150 Calories.

Beware: If you studied chemistry or physics, you may have learned about the unit called the calorie. That is different from the Calorie! A food Calorie (usually capitalized) is 1000 little physics calories. That is a terrible convention, but it is not my fault. Physicists like to refer to food Calories as kilocalories. Food labels in Eu rope and Asia frequently list kilocalories, but not in the United States. So 1 Cal = 1000 cal = 1 kilocalorie.

KILOWATT-HOUR

Another famous unit of energy is the kilowatt-hour, abbreviated kWh. (The W is capitalized, some say, because it stands for the last name of James Watt, but that doesn't explain why we don't capitalize it in the middle of the word kilowatt.) What makes this unit so well known is that we buy electricity from the power company in kWh. That's what the meter outside the house measures. One kWh costs between 5 and 25 cents, depending on where you live. (Electric prices vary much more than gasoline prices.) We'll assume an average price of 10 cents per kWh in this text.

It probably will not surprise you that there is a smaller unit called the watt-hour, abbreviated Wh. A kilowatt-hour consists of a thousand watt-hours. This unit isn't used much, since it is so small; however, my computer battery has its capacity marked on the back as 60 Wh. Its main value is that a Wh is approximately 1 Calorie. So for our purposes, it will be useful to know that:

Wh = 1 Calorie (approximately) 1 kWh = 1000 Calories

Physicists like to the use energy unit called the joule (named after James Joule) because it makes their equations look simpler. There are about 4200 joules in a Calorie, 3600 in a Wh, 3.6 million in a kWh.

Table 1.1 shows the approximate energies in various substances. I think you'll find that this table is one of the most interesting ones in this entire textbook. It is full of surprises. The most interesting column is the rightmost one.

Stop reading now, and ponder this energy table. Concentrate on the rightmost column. Look for the numbers that are surprising. How many can you find? Circle them. I think all of the following are surprises:

The very large amount of energy in chocolate chip cookies

The very small amount of energy in a battery (compared to gasoline!)

The high energy in a meteor, compared to a bullet or to TNT

The enormous energy available in uranium (compared to anything else in the table)

Try some of these facts on your friends. Even most physics majors will be surprised. These surprises and some other features of the table are worthy of much further discussion. They will play an important role in our energy future.

Discussion of the Energy Table

Let's pick out some of the more important and surprising facts shown in the energy table and discuss them in more detail.

TNT VERSUS CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Both TNT and chocolate chip cookies store energy in the forces between their atoms. That's like the energy stored in compressed springs-we'll discuss atoms in more detail soon. Some people like to refer to such energy as chemical energy, although this distinction isn't really important. When TNT is exploded, the forces push the atoms apart at very high speeds. That's like releasing the springs so that they can suddenly expand.

One of the biggest surprises in the energy table is that chocolate chip cookies (CCCs) have eight times the energy as the same weight of TNT. How can that be true? Why can't we blow up a building with CCCs instead of TNT? Almost everyone who hasn't studied the subject assumes (incorrectly) that TNT releases a great deal more energy than cookies. That includes most physics majors.

What makes TNT so useful for destructive purposes is that it can release its energy (transfer its energy into heat) very, very quickly. The heat is so great that the TNT becomes a gas that expands so suddenly that it pushes and shatters surrounding objects. (We'll talk more about the important concepts of force and pressure in the next chapter.) A typical time for 1 gram of TNT to release all of its energy is about one millionth of a second. Such a sudden release of energy can break strong material. Power is the rate of energy release. CCCs have high energy, but the TNT explosion has high power. We'll discuss power in greater detail later in this chapter.

Even though chocolate chip cookies contain more energy than a similar weight of TNT, the energy is normally released more slowly, through a series of chemical processes that we call metabolism. This requires several chemical changes that occur during digestion, such as the mixing of food with acid in the stomach and with enzymes in the intestines. Last, the digested food reacts with oxygen taken in by the lungs and stored in red blood cells. In contrast, TNT contains all the molecules it needs to explode; it needs no mixing, and as soon as part of it starts to explode, that triggers the rest. If you want to destroy a building, you can do it with TNT. Or you could hire a group of teenagers, give them sledgehammers, and feed them cookies. Since the energy in chocolate chip cookies exceeds that in an equal weight of TNT, each gram of chocolate chip cookies will ultimately do more destruction than would each gram of TNT.

Note that we have cheated a little bit. When we say there are 5 Calories per gram in CCCs, we are ignoring the weight of the air that combines with the CCCs. In contrast, TNT contains all the chemicals needed for an explosion, whereas CCCs need to combine with air. Although air is "free" (you don't have to buy it when you buy the CCCs), part of the reason that CCCs contain so much energy per gram is that the weight of the air was not counted. If we were to include the weight of the air, the energy per gram would be lower, about 2.5 Calories per gram. That's still almost four times as much as for TNT.

THE SURPRISINGLY HIGH ENERGY OF GASOLINE

As table 1.1 shows, gasoline contains significantly more energy per gram than cookies, butter, alcohol, or coal. That's why it is so valuable as fuel. This fact will be important when we consider alternatives to gasoline for automobiles.

Gasoline releases its energy (turns it into heat) by combining with oxygen, so it must be well mixed with air to explode. In an automobile, this is done by a special device known as a fuel injector; older cars use something called a carburetor. The explosion takes place in a cylindrical cavity known, appropriately, as the cylinder. The energy released from the explosion pushes a piston down the axis of the cylinder, and that is what drives the wheels of the car. An internal "combustion" engine can be thought of as an internal "explosion" engine. The muffler on a car has the job of making sure that the sound from the explosion is muffled and not too bothersome. Some people like to remove the muffler-especially some motorcyclists-so that the full explosion is heard; this can give the illusion of much greater power. Removing the muffler also lowers the pressure just outside the engine, so the power to the wheels is actually increased, although not by very much. We'll talk more about the gasoline engine in the next chapter.

The high energy per gram in gasoline is the fundamental physics reason why gasoline is so popular. Another reason is that when it burns, all the residues are gas (mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor), so there is no residue to remove. In contrast, for example, most coal leaves a residue of ash.

THE SURPRISINGLY LOW ENERGY IN BATTERIES

A battery also stores its energy in chemical form. It can use its energy to release electrons from atoms (we'll discuss this more in chapters 2 and 6). Electrons can carry their energy along metal wires and deliver their energy at another place; think of wires as pipes for electrons. The chief advantage of electric energy is that it can be easily transported along wires and converted to motion with an electric motor.

A car battery contains 340 times less energy than an equal weight of gasoline! Even an expensive computer battery is about 100 times worse than gasoline. Those are the physics reasons why most automobiles use gasoline instead of batteries as their source of energy. Batteries are used to start the engine because they are reliable and fast.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Physics and Technology for Future Presidentsby Richard A. Muller Copyright © 2010 by Prince ton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.