Main Page
From Mainsequence
Contents |
Start!
Why physics? Why math? Why astronomy and earth science?
Why hydrology and limnology and paleontology and cetology and ... ???
For my money it doesn't get much better than this: Science and math as tremendously successful interconnected systems of thought and exploration, an endless landscape of ideas to explore based on direct experiences.
These pages are written for Curious Persons
looking for amazing and beautiful things
hidden in plain sight in the world about us.
These pages are written for Curious Persons
who might imagine that science and mathematics
ought not to be understood "second-hand"
by someone else telling us it is so.
The expression in Latin is "Nullius in Verba": Don't take anybody's word for it.
"Main sequence" is a term from astronomy in reference to
the distribution of most stars we see that purports to relate
their color and brightness. It is used here to describe a
series of interconnected pages, a linked sequence of essays.
If this is a scaffolding hoping to evolve a coherent narrative,
it is also as much an exploration of how-far-can-I-get saying:
"I don't believe X until I see it for myself."
Web resouces such as this one are intrinsically shallow
so book titles are name-dropped here as often as possible.
Let's pick an outrageous claim from physics and dive in.
An Outrageous Claim
"Numerous invisible objects of microscopic size are soaring about the universe in all places, in all directions, throughout all time... many shooting right through each of us every second."
Let's get going; here is a link to the first step of the main sequence.
(The original source material is in transfer to this wiki... it is a set of very cumbersome web pages but is also more complete at the moment (1/2008).)
Mainsequence and other links
- Start and Map pages
- MainSequence 1: Cloud chambers and cosmic rays
- MainSequence 2: The stardust hypothesis
- MainSequence 3: Little toy universes
- MainSequence 4: The photoelectric effect
- MainSequence 5: Casting dice
- MainSequence 6: A physical calculation
- MainSequence 7: Photon deflection
- MainSequence 8: Electromagnetic prisms
- MainSequence 9: Some polar science
- MainSequence 10: Watershed hydrology
- Main Sequence 11: Lunar shenanigans
Measuring Energy Flow Workshop A learning-process resource connecting table-top science to the local environment and the sun-earth-moon system.
Related
"Well," said the Wart, "what about it?"
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devestated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."
T.H.White The Once and Future King
