Have you ever gotten the impression that the introductory physics textbook you are forced to use is a charlatan, that maybe it was designed by physicians and engineers purposely to make physics look boring, so that anyone with any imagination would be driven away? Generally such a book looks much more like a history book, and apparently the author thinks that the only way to learn from the mistakes of history is to repeat them. (Let's hope he didn't write the lab manual, too.) Or maybe he is just a disgruntled physicist, who thinks that, well, he had to learn it that way, so, by golly, that's the way you're going to have to learn it, too. This type of approach has several important drawbacks, even for non-physicists:

• Such books give no hint of how a scientist really thinks. If you learn anything in school, it should be how to think. Memorization is less useful: You can always look it up.
• The science of tomorrow is not the science of yesterday. Even biologists should know quantum mechanics and special relativity, which are relevant to things like molecular biology and particle-beam cancer treatment. The new ideas of tomorrow, in any branch of science, will not come from just old physics.
• College degrees have breadth requirements for a good reason. Breadth does not mean teaching outside topics as if they were inside.

Here is a list of some of the things I have found in such books given to me as the "TA" of such courses:

1. The introductory chapter of the book includes a discussion of units, but nowhere is mentioned the fact that the whole point of units is that you can choose whatever units are most convenient, such as using the (reduced) mass of the electron as a unit of mass in atomic physics.
2. The book begins with "handyman physics": fulcrums, pulleys, etc. Who are we trying to attract to physics, carpenters? (This is why I didn't get interested in physics until I was 8, instead of at 5. By then I learned from Crackerjacks and cereal that the good stuff is at the back, not in the front. But you can't teach a course that way.)
3. No hint of particle physics. Special relativity appears only at the end, if at all, and after electromagnetism and optics. (Ever hear of nonrelativistic light?)
4. Newton's laws are discussed before conservation of energy and momentum. Ironically, conservation of energy is used before Newton's laws for the special case of constant acceleration (i.e., gravity), but only as a subsidiary condition and not by name.
5. Electrodynamics is apparently about circuitry. (What are these stupid constants "ε₀" and "μ₀"?)
6. No complex numbers: sin's, cos's, and complicated trigonometric identities abound.
7. Ampere's law is given first in its original incorrect form (with little hint given that it is wrong), then corrected much later.
8. Maxwell's equations appear in full only in integral form, not differential, even though a partial version of the differential equations is applied to radiation. The gradient appears only in a footnote; the "curl" is never defined.
9. Refraction of light is claimed to have no explanation in terms of particles, quoting Newton's failure. Of course it does: As we know from quantum mechanics, Newton's mistake was to confuse phase and group velocities.
10. For special relativity, Lorentz transformations come before 4-vectors. Minkowski space isn't even mentioned.
11. Planck's constant is introduced in its original form, as "h"; " ħ" does not even appear.
12. Vectors are done with unit vectors "i, j, k" (even in upper-division undergraduate courses). Does anybody really use them anymore? If so, what is the unit vector for time in 4-vectors? (In this old quaternion notation it would be 1, but I'm sure nobody has used that since Maxwell.) Obviously this notation was already out of date in 1905, so why do we still teach 19th-century notation in the 21st century?