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In Mechanics and Relativity, the reader is taken on a tour through time and space. Starting from the basic axioms formulated by Newton and Einstein, the theory of motion at both the everyday and the highly relativistic level is developed without the need of prior knowledge. Applications covered in the book span a wide range of physical phenomena, including rocket motion, spinning tennis rackets and high-energy particle collisions.

• ## 1: Introduction to Classical Mechanics

Classical mechanics is the study of the motion of bodies under the action of physical forces. As is true for any physical model, classical mechanics is an approximation and has its limits - it breaks down at very small scales, high speeds and large gravitational fields - but within its range of applicability (which includes pretty much every single phenomenon in everyday life) it is extremely useful.

• ## 6: General Planar Motion

Although Newton’s laws of motion, the various force laws, and the three conservation laws we have derived, are all valid in three dimensions, we have so far restricted our study of motion almost exclusively to two special cases: linear motion in one dimension, and rotational motion in a plane, where the radius of the rotation is constant. Although for the second case we do need two directions to describe it, the motion itself is constricted to a circle, and thus essentially one-dimensional.

• ## 9: Waves

In physics a wave is a disturbance or oscillation that travels through space accompanied by a transfer of energy, and may be propagated with little or no net motion of the medium involved. In this section we will consider mechanical waves, in which the particles in a material are oscillating. Examples are the waves in the sea, the wave in the crowd at a stadium, and sound.