One of Ciro Santilli's strongest feeling in education is that material often falls in either of the two categories:
- hundreds of too basic popular science, e.g.:
- a 5 minute popular science video trying to explain quantum electrodynamics (an advanced subject) for someone who doesn't know what a Riemann integral is (a basic subject)
- a few full university courses that takes 20 hours to deliver the first punchline of the course
Ciro believes that there is often an important missing link between them, e.g.:
- a 15 minute video that delivers the main end results and motivations for people who already know the very basic stuff
If we as a society are unable to provide this sweet Middle Way sweet-spot, it is unreasonable to expect that learners will ever have the motivation to advance, because it is just too boring! They are just more likely to go play video games instead.
It is Ciro's hope that OurBigBook.com will help to fill exactly that gap.
In Ciro's view, as of the 2020's this critical gap generally lies somewhere between the end of undergraduate studies, and at the start of postgraduate studies.
What we have to do is make this knowledge more accessible all way down to high school and earlier.
Let's take the gloves off more often, and give the full thing to interested students!
This problem is basically the knowledge version of the last mile problem.
Related:
- https://universityphysicstutorials.com/ by Adam Beatty mentions:
There are myriad resources for physics and maths. The Kahn Academy and Patrick JMT were the best for me. They really helped me out. The question is, what resources are there for the advanced undergraduate courses?
- A Mathematician's Apology
- An Introduction To Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schroeder (1995)
- Bill Nye
- Dietterich Labs
- Educational charitable organization
- Electroweak interaction
- EngineerGuy
- Free gifted education
- Explain how to make money with the lesson
- Explain why the subject is beautiful
- Last mile problem
- Physics Explained
- Popular science
- Pretty Much Physics
- Quantum electrodynamics
- Quantum Field Theory lecture notes by David Tong (2007)
- Sean M. Carroll