One-minute help
You can help this project in many ways:
- tell your friends about it,
- contribute misprints or suggestions for new topics, better explanations, riddles, pictures or films to the wiki,
-
add it to
or stumble it 
, - add it to reddit or add it to slashdot,
- add it to connotea or
, - add it to Mister Wong or add it to Clipmarks,
- mention it in Facebook or mention it in Myspace,
- add it to Blinklist or add it to Folkd,
- add it to Furl or add it to Linkarena,
- add it to Technorati,
add it to more English language social bookmarking services,- add it to even more social bookmarking services in various languages with Shareomatic,
- mention it in your blog or your favourite forum,
- write an article about it in some paper (which will need a bit longer).
To do more, read on.
Helping with content
Do you want to actively support the spread of free physics education across the continents? The following contributions would be particularly welcome:
- Supply animations or films with didactic value to embed into the pdf.
- Take and send in images of striking moving phenomena.
- Provide figures of topological defects.
- Suggest a title photograph for Part V ("Pleasure, technology and stars")
- Take and send in pictures about motion in biology.
- Take and send in a photograph of how a candle flame reacts to a rubbed comb.
- A beautiful CAD image of a gyroscope.
- Provide feedback on using Schwinger's quantum theory book in teaching or learning.
- Provide a research reference for the diffusive speed of light in the solar interior.
- Supply details on the mathematics of tree growth: the laws about their proportions, the height of their trunks, the significance of the principle of minimum effort, etc.
- Suggest solutions for any challenge in the text marked "ny" - not yet solved.
- Sponsor online access to electronic physics journals.
- Help to transform this text into a free audiobook that can be read aloud by Acrobat Reader, introducing the pdf tagging mechanism into LaTeX and possibly into pdftex. As the first step, I'd just like to know how to code an "artifact" (something that is not read aloud by Acrobat Reader) into the pdf using latex. As a second step, I'd like to teach pdftex to read ligatures properly.
- Help to modify the LaTeX package wrapfigure so that one can get pictures in uppermost and lowermost position on a page automatically or semiautomatically.
- Mail in a 'welcome' page in your mother language, translating this English page. That takes about 30 minutes of work. (If you can, include the meta tags in the HTML code.)
- Change the wiki layout in such a way that it looks like the rest of the website.
- Shorten the file motionmountain.css of this site.
- Convince Adobe to eliminate an ugly and old bug: in Adobe Acrobat Reader, horizontal line thicknesses are shown on screen irregularly in wrong, usually exaggerated thicknesses. That makes tables look horrible. The bug has been noted and communicated to Adobe by many since version 1 of the program; it is still present in version 8. (This one will receive a special reward.)
If you can help on any of these topics or you think some issue not included in the text should be added, suggest it in the wiki or email me at christoph@motionmountain.net; I'll consider it for the next edition. All help is welcome.
Gold sponsor
- Since Mai 2007, this project is supported by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. Version 21 is the first result of their support.
Silver sponsor
- In 2006 and 2007, Benoît Clenet translated over 360 pages into the French language. Thank you very much for this fantastic effort!
Bronze sponsors
- José Manuel López López translated the chapter on special relativity into the Spanish language,
- Vincent Isoz with OWS.ch and Evert Meulie are providing the pdf download of the book since 2005,
- the Digital City of Eindhoven provides web hosting since 1997,
- Marco Fulle, Roberto Carniel and Jürg Alean provided volcano images from www.swisseduc.ch/stromboli,
- Gilles Réigner provided tide photographs from his site www.gillesregnier.com,
- Shinywhitebox provided a copy of its IShowU screen capture software for animations,
- Daugerresearch provided a copy of its Atom in a Box software to visualize atomic orbitals,
- Wolfgang Jost provided a photograph of a white shark from his website www.jostimages.com,
- Lucas Barbosa and José Antonio Díaz Navas produced animations specifically for this text,
- Two figures from www.messmittelonline.de have been included by kind permission,
- Luca Gastaldi, Antonio Martos and Ulrich Kolberg produced images specifically for this text,
- Rüdiger Paschotta provided images from his Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology found at www.rp-photonics.com/encyclopedia.html,
- Content and editing help came from Mikael Johansson, Bruno Barberi Gnecco, Lothar Beyer, including the numerous improvements by Bert Sierra, the detailed suggestions by Claudio Farinati, the many improvements by Eric Sheldon, the advice of Andrew Young, the continuous help and advice of Jonatan Kelu, the corrections of Elmar Bartel, and in particular the extensive, passionate and conscientious help of Adrian Kubala,
- Heiko Oberdiek, Michael Zedler, Achim Blumensath and Donald Arseneau helped extensively with fonts and typesetting,
- Ulrich Dirr provided professional typographic consulting,
- Bildhaft provided web design,
- my wife Britta provided suggestions and constant support.
Iron sponsors
Content: Numerous readers have provided material for this text: a warm thank-you to every one of them. Important material was provided by Bert Peeters, Anna Wierzbicka, William Beaty, Jim Carr, John Merrit, John Baez, Frank DiFilippo, Jonathan Scott, Jon Thaler, Luca Bombelli, Douglas Singleton, George McQuarry, Tilman Hausherr, Brian Oberquell, Peer Zalm, Martin van der Mark, Vladimir Surdin, Julia Simon, Antonio Fermani, Don Page, Stephen Haley, Peter Mayr, Allan Hayes, Igor Ivanov, Doug Renselle, Wim de Muynck, Steve Carlip, Tom Bruce, Ryan Budney, Gary Ruben, Chris Hillman, Olivier Glassey, Jochen Greiner, squark, Martin Hardcastle, Mark Biggar, Pavel Kuzin, Douglas Brebner, Luciano Lombardi, Franco Bagnoli, Lukas Fabian Moser, Dejan Corovic, Steve Carlip, Corrado Massa, Tom Helmond, Gary Gibbons, Heinrich Neumaier, Peter Brown, Paul Vannoni, John Haber, Saverio Pascazio, Klaus Finkenzeller, Leo Volin, Jeff Aronson, Roggie Boone, Lawrence Tuppen, Quentin David Jones, Arnaldo Uguzzoni, Frans van Nieuwpoort, Alan Mahoney, Britta Schiller, Petr Danecek, Ingo Thies, Vitaliy Solomatin, Carl Offner, Nuno Proença, Elena Colazingari, Paula Henderson, Daniel Darre, Wolfgang Rankl, John Heumann, Joseph Kiss, Martha Weiss, Antonio González, Antonio Martos, John Heumann, André Slabber, Ferdinand Bautista, Zoltán Gácsi, Pat Furrie, Michael Reppisch, Enrico Pasi, Thomas Köppe, Martin Rivas, Herman Beeksma, Tom Helmond, John Brandes, Vlad Tarko, Nadia Murillo, Ciprian Dobra, Romano Perini, Harald van Lintel, Andrea Conti, François Belfort, Dirk Van de Moortel, Heinrich Neumaier, Jaroslaw Królikowski, John Dahlman, Fathi Namouni, Paul Townsend, Sergei Emelin, Freeman Dyson, S.R.Madhu Rao, David Parks, Jürgen Janek, Daniel Huber, Alfons Buchmann, William Purves, Pietro Redondi, plus a number of people who chose to remain unnamed.
Animations and films: All included films are copyrighted; they were provided by Martin Elsässer, Jarmo Hietarinta, Lim Tee Tai, Thomas Weiland, Daniel Schroeder, Roger Sabbadini, Dean Dauger, Greg Egan, Jake Socha, Lucas Barbosa and José Antonio Díaz Navas.
Photographs: Almost all photographs, in total more than 200, shown in the text and on the website are copyrighted; permission to use them has been kindly provided by each copyright holder. The names are mentioned below each picture, in the index of names, and on the picture credit page in the appendix.
Software: The textbook was typeset using its own LaTeX class file, the MinionPro package and over 60 existing LaTeX packages, using Gerben Wierda's gwtex distribution and Andrew Trevorrow's OzTeX. Numerous limitations and bugs in the tex distribution, in LaTeX, in LaTeX packages and even in programming editors had to be corrected to typeset the text. The software tools were refined with the repeated and valuable support of Donald Arseneau; help came also from Ulrike Fischer, Piet van Oostrum, Gerben Wierda, Klaus Böhncke, Craig Upright, Herbert Voss, Andrew Trevorrow, Danie Els, Sebastian Rahtz, Don Story, Vincent Darley, Johan Linde, Joseph Hertzlinger, Rick Zaccone, John Warkentin, Ulrich Diez, Uwe Siart, Will Robertson, Joseph Wright, Enrico Gregorio and Alexander Grahn.
Website: The programming of the html pages owes much to the help of Greg Smith and Michael Beretka. Chris Garbers helped for the wiki and many other issues. The website uses several PHP scripts from the PHPJunkyard. Translations of the html pages are due to Daniel Gutmanas, Romano Perini, Matous Ringel, Marek Gajdos, Irwan Prasetya Gunawan, Jarosław Królikowski, Johnny Chadda, Martin Clausen, Dimitar Genchev, Ryan, Kasper Olsen, Helga Trapp, Thomas Wahlstrøm, Gorka Ochoa, Ambrož Demšar, Roman Beslik and Paul Townsend.
Colour sponsors
The many readers who sent feedback, suggestions and criticism helped making this text into what it is today. Thank you for the support! You add the colour to this project.
