About the Physics Virtual Bookshelf

The bookshelf is a "permanent" repository for documents about Physics written by staff members of the Department of Physics, University of Toronto. Many of them were originally written as notes for various undergraduate courses given by the staff. Since often such notes are lost when the professor coordinating the course changes, those that are felt to be of interest to a wider community are collected here.

The contents of the bookshelf are sorted by category. Some documents are listed in more than one category, and the All category includes all the documents.

In 2002-2003 the bookshelf was accessed over 12,000 times, with a significant fraction of those accesses not by Physics students at the University.

An issue for on-line documents is whether to read them on your screen or print the document and read it as hardcopy. The choice depends on the individual: most people find that reading hardcopy is much more effective than reading on a screen, particularly for the types of documents provided here. This distinction means that for some documents you will find links to an html and a pdf version of the same document. In this case, line breaks have been inserted into the html version so that the pdf version generated from it paginates reasonably when the document is printed.

Reading pdf documents requires that you have the Acrobat Reader, which is available free from http://www.adobe.com.

The bookshelf is linked to from the Physical Sciences Information Gateway (PSIgate) hosted by the University of Manchester. You may access the gateway by clicking on the logo to the right.
Click to access PSIgate

 

Click here to go to the Virtual Bookshelf.