Oceans of Truth

One of the myths of our modern popular culture is that scientific knowledge is a set of discovered facts; in reality, the laws of physics are a human construction, a story that we tell to explain why the world is the way it is.  In this book we introduce the reader to the study of physics by tracing the evolution of ideas from the earliest remnants of human civilization to the present day, exploring along the way some of the factors that may have inhibited or encouraged the development of scientific theories. By following the shifts in perspective that allowed for the revolutionary advances in thinking in the past, we hope to examine the cultural context of our most modern ideas.  We hope that the journey will provide a glimpse into the ways that our modern theories are bound and limited by our modern cultures and ways of thinking, and what new ideas might lie ahead.

This book makes use of many interactive elements, including animations that are designed to help the reader visualize the complex phenomena and techniques of analysis that it covers.  This is the textbook for the introductory physics classes at San Francisco University High School, and it is still under development.  Further enhancements will be released periodically.