Seeking Comments on a Web Site Idea of Mine

Thank you very much Martin ! :-)

I guess the missing bit of information is my intended audience. The particular person I have in mind is the late high school student who may be going on to higher education in broadly scientific areas of learning. Some background is appropriate and arises from my knowledge of where I live during the last thirty or so years.

The status of mainstream secondary level teaching and hence learning outcomes has dramatically plunged in the last few decades. The reasons for this are mostly systemic and basically comes down to the lack of any focused persistent public policy targeting good outcomes for young people when they need skills to gain employment. This is not a diatribe against teachers, as you have to consider the context under which they are required to operate. Nuff said about that ....

Now the technical type of higher education facilities have had to invent very many SoAndSo:101 units to fill the gaps of what is not being taught ( but once was ) at secondary school. They have to do this to bring all the new students up to some common level before they can move on. There was a time when this could be assumed from any suitably schooled student on high school leaving. Now they can make no assumptions and since around the year 1990 these faculties have discovered they need to solve that problem because no one else is.

This can be a train wreck for many aspiring young scientists from the get go after high school graduation, who prior to their intersection with universities etc had no clue of the above scenario. Their problem is not their cognitive skills or motivation but that they unknowingly had been on the wrong railway track. It is incredibly confusing for them because they don't know who to believe about why it is they are at this important period of their lives without a truly solid grounding in the subject matter they want to make a career out of.

{ IMHO : It's a curious paradox that in this so-called Information Age people actually know less of physical truth than they used to .... much of what is presented now, for inspection of and choice between, are merely different variants of fantasy. }

A simple example may help : Newton sez things fall towards the ground. This has been checked as valid via observation and thus Isaac's ideas have been in good scientific favour since. This is not random opinion or 'just a theory'. There is a methodology to follow if you want to correctly assert that this universe has Newton's Laws as some of the rules. This is a far higher level of abstraction than rote memorising of formulae, with specific value insertion into an equation and use of a calculator come exam time. Currently many crucial intellectual connections are not being made, nor any exercise/challenge of young minds who ( pretty well by definition ) love to poke things to see if they burst or break.

Now I know I'm probably sounding like an old fart with all this "in my day ...." style of commentary. I'm a generalist at heart. However bricks are not of much use if you don't have mortar to bind. I'd like to provide some mortar. However that in turn means you have to know something of the bricks. At the moment I've haven't really done much of either bricks or mortar. I'm experimenting with the presentation. In fact many of my prior ( science forum ) threads, as you mention, have been experiments in generating lucid & readable content. Certainly something like set theory will be much enhanced by diagrams etc. HTML per se is poor in the area of representing scientific notation.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Sorry, I haven't answered some of your queries :

- many textbooks are great 'potted summaries' but lack integrative comment.

- I will target E@H eg. set theory -> functions -> continuity -> derivatives -> metrics/topology/manifolds -> the guts of almost all of modern field theories including General Relativity ( that vague brush-stroke comes straight of the top of my head, so don't panic about the brevity ).