Motion Mountain - The Adventure of Physics is downloaded over 30 000 times per year. (If other sites are included, the number is even higher, though by an unknown amount.) This number puts it among the most widely read physics texts across the world.
Recommendations to read the Motion Mountain
textbook come from
- many college and university students, such as Jaime, who writes "Motion Mountain is probably the biggest, most professional freely available and published online textbook",
- numerous university physics departments and physics teachers across the continents,
- fellow physics textbook authors,
- the article How to learn physics at home, which advises reading Motion Mountain as one of four steps to do so,
- the California Learning Resource Network, who since 2010 is promoting it to physics teachers,
- the influential blog cinghiale digitale, who in 2010 called it "splendid",
- the influential blog by Stephen Downes, who in 2008 called it a "gem",
- the influential Cool Tools blog by Kevin Kelly, who in 2008 called it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece",
- the Christmas 2007 column of This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, where John Baez, from the University of California at Riverside, advised to use it in case "you're dying to learn physics, but don't know where to start" and called it a "feast of ideas - romantic, wildly amibitious, and still not finished",
- the EU-funded European Gateway to Science Education, which is distributing it to science teachers, science communicators and pupils since 2006,
- the Stingyscholar
website, which awarded the text the beggin-and-choosin award for
"best textbook" in 2005:
- awards and articles from numerous science and education websites,
among them:
- a 2007 article in Heise online, who called it a "liebevoll gemachtes Liebhaberprojekt" (a project made with love by an enthusiast),
- the Physical Sciences Ressource Center of the American Association of Physics Teachers, where it was a featured site in 2007,
- various Wikipedia articles in various languages that cite it as reference,
- the well-known Learnoutloud blog, where in 2006 Jonathan Bischke called it "amazing" and put it among the six best ways to learn physics for free,
- NASA's emlib, now hosted at IEEE,
- the famous Boingboing blog, where Cory Doctorow wrote in 2005 that it is "perfect to dip into when you have a particular subject you want to get up to speed on",
- three governments: this site is proud to have been repeatedly blocked by the totalitarian governments of Tibet, mainland China and Myanmar. But the site is also unavailable in North Corea, Chad, the Central African Republic and almost unavailable in various other countries whose governments do not respect human rights. As a result of the lack of human rights, such countries have few teachers, technicians, scientists and engineers, and therefore have little chance to achieve decent standards of living;
- the persons who organized a DoS attack against it,
- a 2005 article in the French Onirik e-zine, where David Lapetina called it "une mine d'or" (a gold mine),
- the Return of Whatever podcast in 2005,
- an article in The Physics Teacher,
- an article in the July 2004 edition of Physics Education,
- a short article in Physikalische Blätter, the journal of the German physical society.
Some reader feedback from the guestbook,
emails to the author, and the internet:
- "Motion Mountain is by far the best open textbook I’ve come across." - Wynn Williamson
- "This book is absolutely phenomenal." - Didi Conimbriga
- "Thanks for this treasure." - Andres Nunez
- [The theory of] "evolution is not science; why do you support it?" - Fred Smith
- "Astrology is correct; your negative remarks about it should be changed!" - Wiebke van Leeuwen
- "Probably the most interesting physics book you will ever see." - Art Ruff
The textbook has also been cited in
- various physics research papers, such as: Jorge G Russo and Paul K Townsend, Relativistic kinematics and stationary motions, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42, 445402 (2009); P Facchi and S Pascazio, Quantum Zeno dynamics: mathematical and physical aspects, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 41, 493001 (2008); E Minguzzi, Classical aspects of lightlike dimensional reduction, Class. Quantum Grav. 23, 7085 (2006); Harald van Lintel et al., The rod and hole paradox re-examined, Eur. J. Phys. 26, 19-23 (2005);
- several physics theses;
- various studies on education research, such as: B Assefa et al., Ethiopian Journal of Education and Sciences, 3, 71-80 (2008); a US-American study on electronic textbooks; a study on educational software by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.