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From Leo Szilard to the Tasmanian wilderness
Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...
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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
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I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
I showed this to a friend, she couldn't get past the first page where you talk about liquids and gases being hard to distinguish. I think it was a too technical and didn't convince her. In her mind it is "obvious" how to distinguish them, so she complained to me that physicists just sweep things under the rug.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the very helpful feedback. Thank your friend too. I will work on simplifying.
DeleteI agree with anonymous above. It is not the easiest read.
ReplyDeleteI feel like you are trying to be a good physicist and cover all the bases. But, to do that with a limited word count, you are using complex grammar and a dense vocabulary, which is precise to you and me, but is too high level for a layperson. Maybe some hard decisions have to be made to cut out beloved topics? For example, do you absolutely *need* to discuss V vs T here and now in this chapter (or ever)?
A good scientist might read something two or three or more times to get the full understanding. Lay people definitely don't want to go back over a paragraph. I suggest getting your figures in early to set the stage for them. For example, in the last paragraph on page 1, you could put Figure 2.1 immediately after "One method to detect phase transitions is to measure how the temperature and density of the material changes as heat is added." You will need to do some rewording but it'll put something in their mind's eye early.
Notice too that your paragraph jumps around. Your figure has a simple chronology: heat is applied over time. Your text has heating and cooling. I think the simple chronology is better because it is like a story.
I hope that helps!
Unknown,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the very helpful comments and feedback. I will revise/rewrite accordingly.
cheers
Ross