This website has been developed for people who want to make a hobby of learning science! A hobby is something that is done for enjoyment: there are no deadlines; there are no tests; there is just the simple pleasure of doing it! And, as it is with hobbies, one wants to understand the details. This project will focus on two fundamental questions, frequently asked by Arnold Arons, my favourite science educator, how do we know...? and why do we believe...?
Countless popular science books have been written to provide the general public with an overview of the truly astonishing accomplishments of science. I have read many of them with a great deal of enjoyment. But I want more than an overview - I want to understand the science; I want to understand the rational basis that explains why we believe these things to be true - and I'm not afraid to learn some math to do it! These are the characteristics I think of an interested amateur. If you share those interests, then seftia.ca is for you!
The principle path that has been chosen to get to an understanding of modern science is to follow, in an admittedly fleeting manner, its historical development. Thus it will proceed as much as possible in the voice of the authors of these ideas, which is to say, SEFTIA is primarily a presentation of excerpts from original works strung together with minimal commentary.
The justification for this approach is that very often the same questions arise in the mind of someone learning new material as those that arose in its historical development. But this is most definitely not a history of science - our principal focus is the development of modern scientific ideas through history, not, in general, the rich and diverse circumstances that accompany these stories. In the presentation of the original texts as much as possible, we have an opportunity to hear the voices of the people that lived before us; voices that contributed to the shaping of our understanding of the universe today.
Whenever possible, you will be asked to analyze some problem or data set. The most extreme case of this is the section on Kepler and elliptical orbits, in which the broad outlines of Kepler's discovery are mostly followed through an analysis of a supplied data set. But here and there problems will be set to keep you actively engaged in the process.