~ Early Web Links ~

RainbowSpec is an in-depth yet beginner-friendly educational site exploring how rainbows and color work, covering everything from the visible spectrum and refraction to supernumerary rainbows, fogbows, glories, and thin film interference. The site is thoughtfully organized with starred pages marking foundational concepts, and it links to classic atmospheric optics references that inspired its creation.

Maintained by Stony Brook University's physics department, this extensive link directory covers physics preprints, online journals, conferences, jobs, data sources, and institutions. Researchers and students will find hundreds of curated links spanning Physical Review, arXiv, SLAC SPIRES, astrophysics journals, and community resources like Fermilab and the Nobel Foundation.

The Chaos Group at the University of Maryland presents their research into chaotic dynamics, covering topics like fractal basin boundaries, chaotic scattering, strange attractors, and controlling chaos. Affiliated with multiple departments including Physics, Mathematics, and Electrical Engineering, this site offers a window into decades of groundbreaking nonlinear dynamics research dating back to the mid-1970s.

The Open Source Physics project, supported by NSF and the AAPT, provides free computational curriculum resources including simulations, modeling tools, and student worksheets designed to help learners explore physical phenomena through computer modeling. Highlights include the Tracker video analysis tool and Easy Java Simulations (EJS) framework, making it a comprehensive hub for physics educators and students at all levels.

Donald Simanek, a physics professor, has assembled a sprawling collection of resources covering physics puzzles, perpetual motion machines, pseudoscience debunking, creationism criticism, and science humor. Highlights include the Museum of Unworkable Devices, illustrated lectures, and a rich archive of skeptical and educational content that has earned recognition as one of the top skeptical websites on the web.

A lecture page from a University of Houston astronomy course (ASTR 3131) explaining Einstein's theory of general relativity and the concept of curved spacetime. It covers how mass and energy deform the fabric of spacetime, using accessible analogies like a ball on a bedsheet to illustrate four-dimensional curvature.

Hosted by UCLA, this scholarly archive documents the original scientific contributions of 83 eminent women physicists who worked before 1976, drawing on primary sources including the papers in which their discoveries were first reported. Visitors can explore an annotated photo gallery, historical essays, a searchable database, and firsthand accounts spanning fields from nuclear physics to space physics.

David Tong, a professor at Cambridge University, offers a comprehensive collection of free lecture notes covering nearly every area of theoretical physics, from classical mechanics and electromagnetism to quantum field theory and string theory. The notes are aimed at undergraduates and graduate students and represent a genuinely deep academic resource, with dozens of individual courses each spanning multiple topics.

Created by a University of Toronto physicist, this collection features 99 Flash animations covering topics from Quantum Mechanics and Relativity to Chaos and Fluid Mechanics, making abstract physics concepts visually intuitive. A bonus tutorial teaches how to build your own physics animations in Flash, and the animations are available in multiple languages under a Creative Commons license.

Julian Bunn is a computational scientist at Caltech with a background in particle physics at CERN, DESY, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, now working on seismology and earthquake early warning systems like ShakeAlert. His sprawling homepage serves as a personal aide-memoire covering decades of scientific work, publications, ham radio, genetic algorithms, and even obscure retro computing projects from the DECUS era.