Welcome to ‘Science by degrees’, a website about the physical sciences. It is not a replacement for a textbook, and it won’t replace ‘effortful practice’. But we hope it might help some people across their stumbling blocks. We have asked ourselves what we wish someone had told us when we were studying science, and this site is the result.
We started this website because we think school leavers about to study at university are less well served than other groups in terms of science resources. So initially that was our core audience, and Sections 1 – 13 of the site can be viewed as a complete course in pre-university physics. We were driven to create it because we feel that:
- There is a large gap in conceptual complexity between school science and university science, which can quickly erode the courage of new undergraduates
- Science textbooks and scientific papers are not easy to use for ‘self-teaching’. Ironically, many science text books are only clear once you already understand their content! (That was certainly our experience)
- Science undergraduates are often so busy solving set problems that they do not get to think about the ‘big’ picture of what they are learning; they can stop asking ‘why’? This extends to the use of mathematics – your working memory can be so busy with solving a differential equation, that you forget what it meant in the first place
- It can be quite difficult to find different perspectives on science
Who else is this aimed at?
In short, everyone is welcome here! It quickly became clear to us that our project might also be relevant to:
- Undergraduates finding a course in the physical sciences difficult or struggling to connect ideas
- Interested school students who want to explore beyond the school curriculum, or who want to prepare for application to university
- Science educators who are in training, or new to the job, or want a different perspective from the standard textbook fare
- Organisations training science teachers, especially since non-specialists are routinely expected to teach physics (in the UK at least)
- Professionals who have arrived in the physical sciences via an atypical route – this sometimes happens via psychology or geography, for example
- Members of the general public who want to branch out from the ‘popular science’ shelves, but who can’t really be expected to follow undergraduate textbooks
Why the blog?
The blog is less technical than the core part of the website. It contains things we wanted to provide a different perspective on, to make people think, but which do not fit into the core structure.
3rd party content
All the text and video on the site are our own. We have created the interactive graphs using software from jsxgraph under the GNU Free Documentation License.