Purpose

The purpose of this project is to provide high quality free physics teaching materials to anyone who has access to the Internet. Similar to the “open source” concept for computer software. A cooperative building site for physics materials. Difference from other sites: emphasis here is on entire texts. Many dedicated students can ill afford to pay the outrageous costs of advanced physics textbooks. Many publishers have been accused of adding “bells and whistles” to hike up prices. This is not meant to compete with publishers, but to give an alternative for students or programs which can not afford to buy or require such texts. Another goal is to give an outlet for authors who may have developed physics materials for their classes, but have never had a chance to have an audience larger than their physics classes. I believe there are many such author-teachers throughout the world.

Why limit this to physics? Although physicists came up with the Internet, it’s time we began to take full advantage of this world-wide communication network. The true killer-application for the Internet should be education. I believe the OPEN TEXT concept could have far reaching effects in improving education worldwide.

Note that in late Janurary, 2005, I had a hard disk crash on my office Mac. Many files were lost (approximately 50%) including most of these OPEN TEXT files. (Foolishly, I did not keep them in my DOCUMENTS folder, which the were the only files backep up.) Fortunately, I had the Baylor OPEN TEXT site as my backup! Thus unless I had given this material away, it would have been lost!