Frank S. Crawford Jr. (1923–2003)

At this point, it's about five decades since I took this course. The DIY experiments with household items are quite interesting (whiskey bottle resonator, emptying the bottle is left to the student).

I just pulled it to refer to the problem of how quickly a tuba can change notes.

After graduating, I bought another Optics Kit; I wish I could find another one.

This was, without a doubt, one of the worst textbooks and classes of my undergraduate physics career at the University of Texas at Austin. I can't fully express how much of a waste of time this course was. To this day, two decades later, the thought of that course still rankles. The only other class which comes close was my vector calculus class. Both classes and textbooks managed to cram a couple of weeks worth of material into an entire semester.

Crawford's book applies the ideas of wave phenomena to all kinds of physical phenomena. It's not terribly elegant, but the range of areas covered displays a lot of imagination. The book is actually a lot of fun.