We are two friends working in the science communication industry in the UK. Two years ago we had cause to look at a series of undergraduate physics and math(s) textbooks, and realised that, although we could (roughly) understand them now, they had seemed almost impossible to follow when we really needed them, that is, when we were undergraduates. It’s a cruel irony that much scientific material is often only accessible to people who already understand it, and therefore acts better as reference material than teaching material. This isn’t meant as a criticism, and we understand how and why this happens.
But we did think there might be a gap in the market for ‘self-teaching’ materials at that are accessible, but conceptually rigorous. The result is the website of which this blog is a part. We searched for a target audience, people who are not currently so well-served by existing material. We decided on ‘school-leavers who are going to university to study a science-related degree’, and this is the level that the website is aimed at. We hope it is also relevant to undergraduates who may be finding their course difficult or struggling to connect ideas, and members of the general public who want a more technical approach than often found on the ‘popular science’ shelves, but who can’t really be expected to plough through undergraduate textbooks.
The website was designed to be a fairly ‘tight’ and self-contained web of knowledge. But we found truck-loads of things that made us want to write, but that didn’t fit into the website. Hence this blog, which is really just a lazy excuse to do that writing!
Our approach is that we only write about something if we have an ‘alternative angle’ to received explanations, or to publicize and curate other people’s material that deserves to be better known. We really don’t want to clog up the internet with science content that has already been done. Whether we succeed, only time will tell.
So we had better lay down a science-based blog in the near future and get on with it! We hope you will read it…