About Andrew McNeil
After getting a very ordinary first degree in metallurgy, I was fortunate
to be accepted for a Ph.D. I then worked for several years as a
university post-doctoral researcher, and published a handful of
specialist papers.
I enjoyed experimenting and finding out how “stuff” works, but it
was very specialised, so I then worked for 20 years in a secondary
school, teaching biology, chemistry and physics (and electronics) to
students aged from 11 to 18. So, for example, I would teach the first
ideas of chemical reactions to 12-year-old students through rôle play,
with the students playing the parts of the reacting atoms; I taught
genetics and the Big Bang theory of the expanding universe to
16-year-olds; and I introduced the quantum mechanics of particle-
waves to 18-year-olds. Sometimes I taught all these within the same week.
I started wondering how all these different aspects of our physical universe fit together. If our universe has its origins in a singular Big Bang, then they must all be part of a unified evolutionary narrative. So, how did we get from there to here? By what processes have self-awareness, wonder and laughter emerged out of fundamental particles and forces and energy?
I had discovered that teaching science greatly improved my own understanding. It seemed that the best way – perhaps the only way – to understand something fully is to explain it for someone else. So, I decided that I would write my own account of the universe’s evolution, and I started on this when I retired from teaching, with the distant idea that it might turn into a book. At first the account was just a series of unconnected sections joined by “and then…” links, with no overall structure. But after a while, I realised that the whole scheme fitted a simple pattern of a hierarchy of communities of things, and this is the basis of “The Communal Universe”.
I have tried to write the book to be accessible to a general reader with a reasonable scientific education, say, a good pass in science at 16+ level. The reader needs only to be comfortable with simple formulas of the type a = b x c, and with simple graphs, basic scientific units and standard form for handling large and small numbers, for example, giving the speed of light as 3 x 108 m/s.
Like many people, I’m a visual thinker and learner, and so the book has many original illustrations, which complement the text.
Other resources
In my time as a teacher, I wrote a full set of homeworks and revision resources for the A-level Physics course.
I also wrote a course in Thinking Skills for Year 7−8 students.