Physics for beginners/Journal/Announcements

About the author
Matthew Raspanti was born in 1924 in New York City but moved to Sicily as a child, where he eventually earned a doctorate in industrial engineering summa cum laude at the University of Palermo. He also earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in the United States, where he worked at Bell Labs for 35 years, most of that time as a department head. Since retiring he has written extensively on physics and philosophy. For more works written by Raspanti, visit his home page at:


 * http://www.thenatureofthings.info/index.html

Talmud analogy
Have you ever noticed that Wikipedia articles are cluttered with information that not everybody cares about? That is not really a flaw in Wikipedia, but more like a flaw in attempting to teach using Wikipedia. Not every interesting idea generated by Raspani's "Physics for beginners" belongs in a typical college course on conceptual physics. Raspini's book needs to be supplemented with commentary.

This page from the Vilna Edition Shas of the Talmud serves to illustrate how we can construct an interesting physics textbook. Raspani's "Physics for beginners" is the oldest and most central text, as is the Mishnah. Our job is to collectivley to create the Gemara, Rashi and other commentaries.

The solution is to design this Wikiversity resource to encourage parallel efforts. This current effort is the first parallel effort to this commentary