I’ve set up this web-site to make some of my work available, because it may be useful to someone, somewhere, at some time.
The web-site has three parts:
1) Physics Resources – a comprehensive collection of homeworks and revision aids for A-level physics.
2) Thinking Skills – a 2-year course on Thinking and Learning skills for Year 7 and 8 students in the UK.
3) The Communal Universe – the book I’m currently working on, and nearly finished.
Some background
I worked for several years in England as a university post-doctoral researcher, and published a handful of minor specialist papers in metallurgy, crystallisation and electrochemistry. After that I worked for 20 years in an 11-18 secondary school, eventually becoming Head of the Science department. I could not find any decent resources for A-level Physics students to practise problems, so I wrote my own, bit by bit, over a few years. They cover all the topics in the AQA course, and include resources for revision. These are the Physics Resources.
As I taught various classes over the years I became more and more interested in the mechanics of thinking and learning, and realised how little I knew of it. I was fortunate to gain accreditation as Advanced Skills Teacher, and in my final years as a teacher I wrote and delivered a two-year course in Thinking and Learning skills, for students in Years 7 and 8. The entire course is available in the Thinking and Learning section.
My subject specialism was Physics, but I taught all the sciences, and electronics, to all years – for example, chemical reactions through role play to 12-year-old students, genetics and Big Bang theory to 16-year-olds, and the quantum mechanics of particle-waves to 18-year-olds – sometimes all within the same week. I started wondering how all these different aspects of the physical universe fitted together. If our universe has evolved from a unique Big Bang event, then they must all be part of a unified, connected story.
I had found from my teaching that the best way – perhaps the only way – to understand something fully is to have to explain it. So, I decided that I would write my own account of the universal story as a book, and I started on this in 2005, when I retired from teaching. At first my account was just a narrative, a series of unconnected sections joined by “and then…” links. Then, sometime in the autumn of 2011, I realised that the whole scheme followed a simple hierarchical pattern, and this is the basis of The Communal Universe.
The remit is very broad, taking in particle and atomic physics, chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience, primatology, and anthropology. I have no particular expertise or authority in any of these specialist fields. I am a practical scientist with a general grasp of a fairly broad range of scientific disciplines, a big collection of second-hand text books and downloaded research papers, a big debt to Google, and a habit of asking “How does that work?”.
I hope you find the material here interesting and useful, and I wish you well.
Any constructive feedback is welcome, and I can be reached via the email address below.
Andrew McNeil
andrewmcneil48<at>gmail<dot>com
October 2021