physics and biology sites

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

Do you know of any sites like Chemguide covering physics and biology?

Physics

This excellent site was written for American High School Students by Tom Hendersen. The section which I read (on colour theory) was the best and most easily understandable I have come across anywhere, and a quick look at other sections shows the same friendly style, care, and attention to detail. This site is still developing, so you may not find everything you want at the moment - but it is definitely worth keeping your eye on.

There were problems accessing this site in mid-2008, and its URL changed without warning. If you find any further problems with this, please contact me via the address on the about this site page.

Biology

Biology Animations	This page is produced by an American Community College and provides links to all sorts of biology animations and other interactive pages. When you have played with these, have a look at their Main Biology Menu from the link at the top of the page for a whole lot more links. A wonderful resource!
BiologyMad.com	Written for the UK AQA A level syllabus, but worth a look whatever syllabus you are studying at this level.

Otherwise, there are a quite a lot of sites out there covering physics and biology at this level, but my impression of them is that they would be good for revision, but not so good if you were struggling to understand something in the first place. If you want to find what is available a Google search on "a level" physics or "a level" biology should throw up a good selection.

If you are doing some other exam - IB, for example, or Scottish Highers - you could try searching for these in a similar way, but it would still be worth looking for A level sites (and vice versa for A level students).

Physics, especially, is probably a difficult subject to explain simply on the web, because so much of it is mathematical. Calculations are very hard to do well on the web.

Personally, as soon as some maths appears in a chemistry web site, I switch off - and that's despite my having written a chemistry calculations book. There are too many distractions. It is too easy to feel that the calculations are boring, and "I'll just see if I've got any e-mails." or "I wonder if anyone else is on-line for a quick chat." - or whatever else you do with your computer to avoid doing anything useful! (In fact, as I was writing this, my mail program showed an incoming e-mail and so I broke off to see whether it was anything interesting. It wasn't. It was just flybe.com offering some cheap flights which I don't need at the moment - but I read it anyway!)

If you are trying to learn to do calculations, you definitely need a distraction-free environment. They need too much concentration.

If you do come across a good physics or biology site which helped you to understand physics or biology topics rather than just revising them, please let me know via the address at the bottom of the about this site page, and I will add some links here on this page.

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