~ Early Web Links ~

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.

Mike Daub is a physics and mathematics educator with a master's from UC Berkeley who spent five seasons at the South Pole researching experimental cosmology on the ACBAR project. His personal site covers his academic background, libertarian politics, photography, and a no-nonsense hand-coded HTML philosophy with no frameworks or tracking.

James Ziegler's authoritative site hosts SRIM and TRIM, widely used scientific software packages that calculate the stopping and range of ions in matter for research and engineering applications. The site includes downloadable software, textbooks, tutorials, a historical review spanning 100 years of ion stopping research, and resources covering topics from cosmic ray soft errors to neutron damage.

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.

William J. Beaty, an electrical engineer from Seattle, explores the fascinating physics of traffic jams, treating highway congestion as fluid dynamics and demonstrating how a single driver can dissolve traffic waves. The site features animations, videos, experiments, and links to academic research on 'jam-absorption driving,' making it a surprisingly deep dive into an everyday phenomenon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.