~ Early Web Links ~

John G. Cramer's subject index collects his long-running 'Alternate View' column from Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine, organizing hundreds of short essays on cutting-edge science into topics like quantum mechanics, cosmology, wormholes, and space drives. Running from 1984 to the present, this archive is a remarkable resource for hard SF readers and writers who want rigorous, accessible science writing from a working physicist.

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.

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.

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.

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 official homepage of Gerard 't Hooft, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist at Utrecht University, covering his research into quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and black hole physics. Visitors can access his lecture notes, publication list, curriculum vitae, and his ongoing work on deterministic quantum mechanics and the origins of quantum behavior.

Created by Norman Hugh Redington at MIT, The Net Advance of Physics is an encyclopedic collection of review articles and tutorials covering the full breadth of physics, organized alphabetically and continuously updated since 1995. Special features include a 19th century physics retro archive, history of science resources, a science poetry collection, and curated links to recent controversies in the field.

Robert G. Brown, a physicist at Duke University, shares an extensive collection of free online textbooks, physics study materials, poetry collections, philosophy essays, and beowulf cluster computing resources. The site is a sprawling intellectual hub covering everything from GPL software tools to metaphysics, all freely licensed under an open public license.

The Particle Adventure is an award-winning interactive guide to particle physics from the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, covering quarks, neutrinos, the Higgs boson, dark matter, antimatter, and particle accelerators. Available in over a dozen languages and designed for students and curious minds alike, it offers classroom activities, particle history charts, and deep dives into the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

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.