The current version is a revised version of the original 1960 textbook Physics for Students of Science and Engineering by Halliday and Resnick, which was published in two parts (Part I containing Chapters 1-25 and covering mechanics and thermodynamics; Part II containing Chapters 26-48 and covering electromagnetism, optics, and introducing quantum physics).

A 1966 revision of the first edition of Part I changed the title of the textbook to Physics.

[1] It is widely used in colleges as part of the undergraduate physics courses, and has been well known to science and engineering students for decades as "the gold standard" of freshman-level physics texts.

The first edition of the book to bear the title Fundamentals of Physics, first published in 1970, was revised from the original text by Farrell Edwards and John J.

These are conceptual ranking-task questions that help the student before embarking on numerical calculations.