Category Archives: education

Understand Classical Mechanics Precisely, Very Precisely

The excellent Nerd Wisdom website steered me toward a most unusual book about understand classical mechanics (Lagrangian and friends, see contents for details) precisely enough that computers can manipulate the expressions involved. Not numerical values, expressions.

I remember that when I learned about all these stuffs back in college, I was a master of symbol manipulation and automatically assumed or ignored details as necessary to arrive at the final solutions. Many of my friends had more trouble doing this since they were more precise thinkers and never got used to hand-waving arguments involved. This book would be a great boon to them. There’s no ambiguity left in the symbols if computers can understand them.

Young physicists in training might find this useful too.

Another Resource For Budding Mad Scientists

Training the next generation of mad scientists takes a lot of work. I have to keep abreast of the current research news and not be too ignorant to know roughly what is being said. As a result, I can only understand less than 0.000001% of human knowledge. Good thing that we have a website like MadSci Network where people dedicated to training more mad scientists pool their heads together to form one giant collective cranium.

If you don’t know where to start, you might want to go here first.

Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time

I knew of the “Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories” website because I saw the “How to make the simplest electric motor” link on Reddit (which, by the way, is a very effective, very entertaining time sinker guaranteed to suck years from your life.)

If you like the Evil Mad Scientist site, you might also find Science Toys and The Science Toy Maker interesting also. I think these websites will be very handy when Titus and Tatia start on their apprenticeship in mastering space and time. After all, inventors of warp drives need to start somewhere.