~ Early Web Links ~

Richard Fitzpatrick is a Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in fusion studies, with this page serving as a hub for his research, teaching materials, academic papers, talks, and books. Visitors interested in plasma physics or fusion energy will find a gateway to substantial scholarly resources from an active academic researcher.

The String Coffee Table is a collaborative group blog hosted at the University of Texas at Austin, bringing together physicists to discuss string theory, loop quantum gravity, conformal field theory, and related advanced topics. Posts make heavy use of MathML for rendering equations, and contributors include researchers like Urs Schreiber and Lubos Motl, making it a rich academic resource for cutting-edge theoretical physics.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

A physics professor at SUNY Stony Brook takes aim at pseudoscience and scientific quackery, exploring the psychological and personality traits that lead people to reject well-established science like evolution, vaccination, and modern physics. The page is a sharp, witty critique of fringe theorists who show up insisting their ideas will overturn all known physics, drawing a careful distinction between bold legitimate scientists and true cranks.

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.