Wiki99:About
From Wiki99
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Introduction
wiki99 is Maynard Handley's personal wiki.
Physics
The most important content here is the physics content.
Target audience
As a reader, the first thing you need to understand is that I am targetting
graduates, bright undergraduates and mathematically mature non-physicists
(astronomers, engineers, economists and so on).
There are plenty of resources targetting K12 and undergrads.
There are many blogs that track the minutiae, successes and squabbles of
post-doc and academic physics.
I'm not interested in either of those topics, so don't expect to find them here.
Content
I'm frequently frustrated at just how poorly physics is explained and presented in textbooks. Language is used in a misleading fashion, and obsolete models and ways of thought are commonplace. There is an institutional bias towards not explicitly pointing out the fallacies of the past. (As an example, quantum mechanics is taught using the language of Bohr and Heisenberg even though, in eighty years since then we've learned a vast amount that they did not know, and which is best presented using rather different language.)
This is not a crank site. While I frequently criticize the way physics is taught, I am not out to rewrite physics, to tell you how time has mass or how vortices make up the universe. My goal is give you, the reader, a new set of example, a new way of understanding the content of modern physics, so that when you go back to your textbook you will understand clearly and confidently, rather than vaguely and uncomfortably, exactly what the author means.
I don't present much calculation, but I expect you to be comfortable with mathematical abstractions. While I will explain the mathematical ideas required that are not a standard part of the undergrad curriculum, I expect you to be comfortable with the abstraction inherent in mathematics.
I intend to write about whatever interests me. I'm starting with some fairly simple issues in thermal physics. After that I'll tackle, as a large project, quantum field theory. Beyond that probably general relativity and some solid state.
I have little interest in leading edge stuff: strings, dark energy and so on. I'm sure that at least some of the people involved with that are doing good work, but I have a different agenda; rather than poorly explaining the physics of three years ago, I want to explain well the physics of thirty to fifty to a hundred years ago.
Computers
The second most important content here is the computer-related material. I intend this to be a collection of tutorials on how to set up various services on a MacOS X system. The tutorials are written for my benefit, so that when I need to redo any work for a friend, or after upgrading to a new version of the OS, I remember each step, but I hope they will be of general utility.
As with my physics material, I want readers to really understand what is going on. My tutorials will be longer than most that you find on the net because, along with simply telling what you to do at each step, I try to explain at why things are being done the way they are, and how they fit into the larger picture.
Other
I intend to store other items in this wiki; quotations and jokes I like, lists of books and URLs, and other small snippets of text. People are welcome to look at those, but I expect they'll usually be of interest to no-one but myself.
Copyright
It is a fact of life in modern America that we have to deal with copyright issues right away. All material in this wiki is subject to the this Creative Commons license.
The important point for you to remember is that I want this material
(especially the physics, but also the computer tutorials) to be as widely
spread as possible; I want people to understand and enjoy what they are being
taught in their physics classes, and I want mathematically-literate
non-physicists to have a better idea of physics than simply that quantum
mechanics is magic.
Therefore the copyright on this material allows you to do pretty much whatever
you want with it, as long as you credit me as the original author. You are
welcome to copy it to your web site, print it up in a book and sell it,
translate it into other languages, whatever you like, just as long as you give
me credit and make it clear to people that the original version is available,
for free, on my website.
