I’m a science guy, I like stuff. I like physics. But physics training, especially at the university level, was hard going. I’m not sure if I have a learning style that is uncommon in the population, or if I have a common learning style which isn’t catered to by conventional teaching, or if I’m just easily irritated by anything I don’t like, but I didn’t gel well with my physics schooling. I didn’t have any better ideas of how it should be taught, however.

Now I do, because I found it: HyperPhysics. Hyperphysics is a website built by Rod Nave at Georgia State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. It’s as a web of clickable links. Start at the top, or pick your area of interest, and it feeds you a page with the relevant physics information. Some of the concepts will be unclear to you, and need reinforcing. Those concepts will have links. Click a link, go to that concept, recieve needed reinforcement, and find out where you need to go from there. You can follow any path you want through the knowledge.

I like it, it’s fun.

It sounds simple and obvious because it’s simple and obvious. It works tremendously well, at least for me. I first used it when I was trying to get a grip on the relationship between the electromagnetic spectrum and human vision. The ability to move through topics in a way that is relevant to you is very powerful. Traditional linear progress through somebody else’s idea of a proper scheme for segmentation of knowledge is a shabby stand in by comparison. Efforts to categorize modern scientific knowledge for placement in textbooks may work as dewey decimal systems, but probably not really compatible with actual human learning processes. Index-entry-index-entry reading works okay, but can feel like molasses wading.

Try it, just try it.