What Everett Just Actually Wrote
I first ran into Everett Just's work around 2015 when I was trying to build a self-teaching curriculum in physics and astrophysics for someone who had a decent math background but no formal college courses. Most pop-science books skip the actual math, and most textbooks are written for people who already understand the material. His books land somewhere in between. That gap is why they still get recommended in physics study groups even though nobody really talks about them much anymore. Just published The Physics of Star Trek in 1995, which was honestly the most useful book on that list for practical learning. It walks through relativistic time dilation, energy equations, and basic orbital mechanics using the show as a framing device rather than as the actual subject. The math is real. The explanations are straightforward. If you can do algebra and some basic calculus, you can follow along. He also wrote Quantum Physics for Beginners and a few other titles that cover similar ground, though those are less cited in academic circles. The truth is his work isn't required reading anywhere. It's supplementary material that happens to be accurate.
Getting Started With Everett Just Contributions To Science
If you're trying to use his books as a structured way to learn physics, here is what actually works. Buy or borrow The Physics of Star Trek first. Do not start with Quantum Physics for Beginners — the ordering matters because his earlier book assumes less background. Read one chapter at a time. Do the problems. The problems are what separate this from a typical coffee-table science book. There is a downloadable study guide that circulated on Reddit a while back, mapped chapter by chapter against the actual equations Just references. I found it useful for checking my understanding without flipping back through the book constantly. It is not official. It was made by a reader named u/PhysicsGradStudent around 2018. I think it is still hosted on a personal GitHub page. Search for "Everett Just physics study guide github" and you will find it. The guide is a simple markdown file, no special software needed. Here is where people usually mess this up. They read the chapters without doing the practice problems, or they do the problems and skip the derivations. The derivations are the point. Just shows the full step-by-step math, not the abbreviated version you see in most textbooks. If you are trying to actually learn the material, you need to sit down with a pen and paper and work through every derivation yourself. This takes about 45 minutes per chapter if you are careful. Without that step, the book becomes entertainment, not education. I learned this the hard way on my first pass through the time dilation chapter.
I hit a wall around the section on relativistic velocity addition. The book presents the formula and then moves on quickly, but the problem set includes a question where you have to derive the result from first principles using Lorentz transformations. I spent about two hours stuck on that one problem because I had forgotten how to properly apply the Lorentz boost matrix. The workaround was going to the appendix of Introduction to Classical Mechanics by David Morin, which covers the same topic with more rigor. Just does not give you everything. You need a second source for the gaps.
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What the Work Gets Right
The main strength is accessibility without dumbing things down. Just treats the reader as someone who can handle equations but might not know where to find them in a standard curriculum. He explains why a given equation applies before showing you how to use it. That is the part that most other popular science writers skip. They show the equation, give you a one-paragraph intuition, and call it a day. He also does not oversell the applications. When discussing warp drive concepts, he explicitly states the energy requirements exceed anything currently feasible and that the Alcubierre metric has known instabilities. Some authors pretend speculative physics is closer to reality than it actually is. Just does not do that. That honesty is rare and makes the material more useful for anyone actually studying the field.
What the Work Gets Wrong or Misses
The quantum mechanics coverage is thinner than the relativity section. Quantum Physics for Beginners exists, but it assumes a level of comfort with linear algebra that most casual readers do not have. If you are not already familiar with bra-ket notation and matrix operations, you will struggle with Chapter 4 and beyond. The book mentions the concepts but does not teach the mathematical machinery needed to understand them. That is a real limitation. If your goal is to understand quantum computing from these books, you will need to supplement with something like Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang. Another issue is the publication date. The original Physics of Star Trek came out in 1995. Some of the citations are outdated. The discussion of dark energy, for instance, reflects the state of knowledge from the mid-90s, before the acceleration of universal expansion was well confirmed. This is not a fatal flaw, but it means you should cross-reference any claims about cosmology with a more recent source. A 2020 textbook on cosmology will cover the same topics with current data. The biggest practical problem I found is that several of his titles are out of print. You can find them on Amazon Marketplace or eBay, usually used copies. The pricing varies wildly. I paid $8 for a used copy of the Star Trek physics book on Amazon. Someone else listed it for $47 a month later. The Kindle editions are more consistent in price but sometimes have formatting issues with the equations. The print versions are better if you plan to do the problem sets. Equations in the Kindle version render okay but not perfectly. You will need to zoom in on some of the derivations.
How to Actually Learn From These Books
Set aside a consistent schedule. These books are not designed for casual reading. They require active engagement. Two or three hours per week minimum if you want to retain anything. I structured my own study sessions around one chapter per week, working through the problems on Saturday morning and reviewing any mistakes on Sunday. The weekly cadence matters because the material builds. Skipping ahead or reading too fast causes confusion that compounds. Take notes by hand. Writing the equations out manually forces you to process each step. I tried reading passively once and forgot almost everything within a week. The manual writing process is slower but it sticks. Your handwriting does not need to be good. The act of writing is what matters. Join an online community. The Physics Stack Exchange and the r/PhysicsStudents subreddit both have people who have worked through Just's material. When I got stuck on the gravitational time dilation problem in Chapter 7, a user named lab rat on Stack Exchange walked me through the mistake I was making. It turned out I had applied the Schwarzschild metric incorrectly. The community is small but helpful. Post your specific problem rather than asking for general help. Vague questions get ignored.
Bottom Line
Everett Just Contributions To Science are real and useful, but they are not complete. They fill a specific niche between high school physics and undergraduate coursework. If you are in that gap, they are worth your time. If you already have a textbook, they are supplementary at best. If you have no background at all, start with something like Physics by Halliday, Resnick, and Krane before touching Just's work. The books will not make you a physicist. They will give you a foundation. That foundation is solid. It is just not all you need.
