Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[asymmetric_implosion]

annodomini2: A good suggestion, thanks. I don’t know of the math resources are available on line in a nice form. Wikipedia and other such resources seem to be written for people “in the know” with a memory problem. I will put some thought into how to incorporate the math and physics and not overwhelm the reader. I might assign each section level of math and physics background. My concern is the math used even in simple models tends to rely on college level math usually taken by physical science majors. I can speak only from my college experience in engineering but we took a minimum of 5 semesters of calculus and related topics. Most took at least one or two more courses. That is a heavy burden for the curious reader that wants to learn a bit more.

Patientman: Wow. I knew this would take some time and effort, but now that you laid it out it appears pretty big. My thought was to address a few high impact areas initially. The web site idea seems to be a better choice right now as the script is in development. I prefer a written medium because the reader can re-read the section to better understand the details. As I mentioned above, I think I would assign a rank or a grade to each section to give the reader a heads up before they start a section. My thought was to start the following:

-high school education with little physics-> relate ideas in terms of everyday life as much as possible. Skip the math and talk about concepts and ideas.
-high school education with high school math and physics -> show a few basic equations with algebra
-college (undergrad) general education -> up the math and physics a bit that would be expected of a college educated person.
-college (undergrad) physical sciences -> Break out the equations and discuss details that would bore or confuse the levels below.

I don’t have any intention of going beyond this for one main reason; beyond the undergrad level researchers really need to read the literature after formal training. This level of discussion and debate takes place at several meetings each year that are later distilled into papers, books and other academic mediums. If one has this level of interest, time to subscribe to journals and go to the meetings.