Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Physics and Astrophysics

This text is intended for undergraduate nonscience majors, satisfying a general education requirement or seeking an elective in natural scie nce. It is a text on physics, but with an emphasis on topics and appli cations in astronomy; the perspective is thus different from most unde rgraduate astronomy courses. Rather than discussing what one knows abo ut the heavens (and including, where needed, a brief discussion of the necessary physics), this text develops the principles of physics (as one needs them to understand the behavior of matter on Earth) and uses these to illuminate what we see in the heavens.