It's been a terrible week for Tiger Woods, but the golf star's moment of madness at the steering wheel has brought a surge in sales for a book written by a science writer teaching at Sussex University.

A series of pictures released by Florida police of Woods's wrecked SUV includes a shot of the back seat, complete with waterbottle, towel and furled umbrella. But there among the shards of tinted glass in the footwell sits a well-thumbed copy of a paperback with the golf-appropriate title clearly visible: Get a Grip on Physics.

This incidental role in Woods's domestic drama has been enough to create a rush to get hold of the book, with the title's sales rank on Amazon.com jumping from 396,224 earlier in the week to a high spotted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal of 2,268.

Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was "delighted that anyboy's reading my books. I just wish it was one that's still in print."

Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.

"It's not a book you sit down and read from cover to cover," said Gribbin, "you can dip in and out of it. Tiger Woods is absolutely my target audience. He's busy, hasn't got a lot of time, but wants to catch up on what's happening in physics."

Publishers are becoming increasingly familiar with rapid rises in book sales, though the spikes are more often associated with US presidents. Barack Obama has already sparked a rush on sales of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment, but he is following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton and John F Kennedy, who set off a stampedes for titles by Walter Mosley and Ian Fleming.

Gribbin has yet to see a rise in sales on Amazon.co.uk, where the book was languishing at a ranking of 71,115 this morning (perhaps because it was published in the UK under a different title: Get a Grip on New Physics), but he's hoping that Tiger Woods may graduate onto his other works.

Best known for In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, an exploration of the mysteries of quantum physics still selling well 25 years after it was first published, Gribbin has amassed a back catalogue which ranges widely over modern science. His latest book is In Search of the Multiverse, which charts ideas about alternative realities from Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to recent developments in M-theory pointing to a landscape of alternative universes in string theory.

"Perhaps Woods will see if he can find a universe in which none of this ever happened," suggested Gribbin.