"Meet the People Who Use Physics"—Creating a More Inclusive Introductory Physics Textbook

At the 2023 AAPT Winter Meeting, Xiang, Gray, and Hudgings presented their findings that textbooks “focus overwhelmingly on work attributed to White men of European, British, and North American descent” (1). In this talk I will describe how I have taken to heart the lessons of their presentation in preparing the new edition of our University Physics textbook (2). This edition will include 44 essays by a diverse group of scientists, engineers, and science communicators from five continents and 13 countries, all of whom use physics in their daily work. It will also highlight the contributions of many figures who have not traditionally been mentioned in introductory textbooks, including Émilie du Châtelet (France, 18th century), Eunice Newton Foote (USA, 19th century), Dorothy Hodgkin (UK, 20th century), Hideki Yukawa (Japan, 20th century), Maria Goeppert Mayer (Germany/USA, 20th century), Elmer S. Imes (USA, 20th century) and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (UK/USA, 20th century).