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.
I wish to understood why sunsets are delayed 20 minutes in
the next 21 days, whereas sunrises remain unchanged. Shouldn’t
this stuff be symmetrical with respect to noon?
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.