Dr Phill’s Science Made Simple

I have always been interested in science. The mathematics and the sciences were always my best subjects at school. I have a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Engineering. My career took me down the path of software engineering and later training and coaching.

A pivotal moment occured on 24 December 2012 when my friend Dr Eric Bescher posted the question on Facebook.

It took me months to fully understand the question and its solution the Equation of Time. The project evolved and my target is to be able to predict the time and location of solar eclipses.

One thing became clear during my research is that the signal to noise ratio of the Internet is very poor and getting worse. It is very hard to find good answers to scientific questions. Many articles dive into complex mathematics without explanation that often renders the article incomprehensible. Text books are often just as bad. One major issue is that many texts were written before the modern computer age. Equations are often power series approximations with little or no explanation. A modern laptop can easily perform the full complex computations with no need for approximation.

In 2017 I started a project to understand gravity. It was quite a journey. In the Summer of 2018 I had to understand General Relativity. I had to find my own path as the articles on it tend to omit important information. Einstein’s Field Equations and the Schwarzschild solutions weren’t too difficult. The biggest problem was understanding why things fall. Newton’s concepts of a gravitational force and gravitational potential energy simply don’t exist. The answer lies in the geodesic equations.

I started this web site to make science understandable. I will be adding material as I start sorting my stock of material. Feel free to ask me questions by email <Phill.Edwards@dr-phill-edwards.eu>.

My main career has been in IT, including software development, operations, training and more recently DevOps in the cloud. I have published a number of articles.

In 2015 I got heavily involved with the Socratic web site. My focus was answering questions on Astronomy and Astrophysics. I was reviewer for both subjects. Sadly, Socratic has been turned into a read only archive. A number of my anwsers were featured as exceptional.