TPT WebSights column draft for January, 2008:

WebSights features announcements and reviews of select sites of interest to physics teachers. All sites are copyright by their authors. This column is available as a web page at <http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.Edu/pubs/WebSights/>.

If you have successfully used a physics website that you feel is outstanding and appropriate for WebSights, please email me the URL and describe how you use it to teach or learn physics. The best site monthly will receive a T-shirt. <macisadl@buffalostate.edu>.

A New Theory of Everything (TOE) storms the news:

In the theoretical physics news, unaffiliated physicist-surfer Garret Lisi has very recently garnered a great deal of attention in the popular science press for his work trying to unify all four fundamental forces by subsuming the SU(3) and SU(2) x U(1) Lie groups already used in the Standard Model into the only recently described E8 Lie group. Basically, Lisi points out that E8 decomposes into the pieces that lie at the heart of the Standard Model and also into SO(1,3) the Lorentz group (spacetime). E8 is mathematically termed as both a simple and an exceptional Lie group and so Lisi's unreviewed pre-publication is a modest pun entitled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything at <http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770>. Although not student-friendly mathematically, introductory students may be interested in the nature of science aspects of this work: the proposal, predictions, testing and subsequent refinement or rejection of theories in physics, including the Standard Model. Theories Of Everything (super-symmetry, string theory, GUTs, universal elegance etc) are quite popular science amongst the general public and our students. Wikipedia has a nice short overview article on Lisi's proposal at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything>.

Lisi's own personal site is <http://deferentialgeometry.org/>, a movie showing some root diagram rotations of E8 is <http://deferentialgeometry.org/anim/e8rotation.mov> and two online blogs summarizing and debating the theory including posts by Lisi are at <http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/theoretically-simple-exception-of.html> and <http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617>. There is lots of wonderful critical discourse available for surfing.

Posted to PHYS-L <http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.edu/Phys-l> by John S. Denker <jsd@av8n.com>, with comments by Jack Uretsky and the editor.

PoliJAM Science and Health

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, a popular social science and health blog known as PoliJAM was recently pointed out to this Editor. Several popular science articles might be of interest to students seeking projects; the physics of fading eyesight revealed was the article specifically brought to my attention. <http://www.polijam.com/SciHealth.htm> I encourage readers to submit their favorite physics blogs to WebSights.

The Whysguy:

Freely downloadable physics textbooks:

Ben Crowell of Fullerton College, CA has made his Light and Matter introductory physics text sequence (for life-science students) freely available for download under the creative Commons License from <http://www.lightandmatter.com/>. My students are now reading from the Optics text from that set, a topic not treated in the volume our class text. Others in that series include Newtonian Physics, Conservation Laws, Vibrations and Waves, Electricity and Magnetism and The Modern Revolution in Physics. Crowell also provides instructor's resource materials and two other works based on conservation laws from his site.

The classic and historically important text Practical Physics (1922) by Robert Millikan and Henry Gale is available from the Internet Archive <http://www.archive.org/details/practicalphysics00millrich>, and was reviewed online by John Denker in PHYS-L at <https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/archives/> (search on gale). Denker also points out that some 1000 freely downloadable electronic texts and out-of-copywrite facsimili of physics texts are now online at <http://www.archive.org/>; (search the word physics and select texts as media type) including many classics and much dated material.

The Internet Archive also maintains the important waybackmachine (shades of Under Dog!), also reached from the www.archive.org index page. The waybackmachine lets a user search for no longer existing webpages and sites from past images taken of the web by the archive folk.