Hello,
Every once in a while, you probably ask yourself a question like:
"why can't you reach the speed of light?",
"why does E = mc2?",
"why don't the electrons in atoms just collapse into the nucleus?"
"why are those electrons only allowed to have certain energy levels?"
Or, if you haven't asked yourself those questions but you're thinking maybe you should have - why not give it a go?
Many people want to do this without having to struggle with the mathematics that underpins it. There are lots of excellent "popular science" treatments that admirably meet this need.
Some people have the time, ability and skills to needed to allow them to to become immersed deep in the theories, in their full mathematical complexity. Again there are great textbooks that take this approach.
But there are many of us who come somewhere in the middle:
We may enjoy the "mathematics-free" insights of popular science but are sometimes frustrated by those dreaded phrases - "it turns out that ...", "it can be shown that ..." - which are the inevitable compromise that comes from editing out the maths. We would like to see for ourselves where the theory comes from and how it is derived. Even better, we would like to derive it, as far as we can, for ourselves. We want answers to those questions that are instinctive in childhood but that we sometimes struggle to hold on to as we grow up: "why is that so?" and "how do we know that?" and in physics, those answers usually require some maths, along with the insight.
For many of us, however, the full mathematical treatment of these things is beyond us. We may not have the necessary mathematical training or we may just find it too much to get our heads around. What we need is a maths-lite approach.
This is the gap that Schrödinger's Cormorant aims to fill.