Revised Nuffield Advanced Physics: Guides for Students and Teachers

The Nuffield Foundation's Revised Nuffield Advanced Physics courses did not all cover as many topics or exactly the same topics as in other A-level physics courses. However it did include the core of physics which universities and other institutions regarded as essential to further study.

In the view of the project team, it was more important for students to gain a good understanding of some basic ideas and to be able to use them confidently than to know less about more. The course aimed to show you what doing physics is like. The authors wanted to help students to understand what physics can, and what it cannot do. Hence they aimed to show how theories, models, experiments and facts fit together. They also wanted to illustrate the ways in which physicists also guess, estimate and speculate. Some of the units in the course were devised to emphasise the practical value of physics through its application in science and technology, and its social and economic effects.