A looooooong idealistic ramble

I do not believe anyone would go to a concert to watch a musician stumble through scales and arpeggios, but musicians have to practice scales and arpeggios or they would not be able to perform a symphony.

I do not believe anyone would go to a sports event to watch two sports-people kicking or throwing a ball to each other over and over, but sports-people have to practice those rudimentary sills or they would be unable to do their sports (that is about as far as my sporting knowledge goes, by the way).

I do not believe anyone would go to a comedy show to watch a comedian trying different punchlines and timings for the same joke in a mirror, but these are the sorts of things comedians have to do to become proficient in their art.

Some people might get a thrill by rolling a car down a ramp and measuring its acceleration. Some people might get excited by connecting a few lamps in a simple circuit and measuring the current. Most people would probably find those sorts of activities a bit of a chore, but if we did not do the rudiments, the fundamentals, the basic high-school physics skills, we would not be able to study physics at higher levels. It is at those higher levels that the subject comes alive!

Sure, you can learn bits and bobs from pop science books or even the odd social media post or short video about quantum physics or relativity, but you cannot understand them without the mathematical competency to back them up. You cannot really internalise the more advanced physics without having studied them in depth, and we do not go into that sort of depth until students have acquired the necessary linguistic and mathematical skills. A-Level (or equivalent) courses prepare students by developing those skills so that they can access physics courses at university. GCSE (or equivalent) courses teach the fundamentals so that students can use them to develop the critical thinking and problem solving skills needed for A-Level. All of physics education (and, dare I say it, all of education across most subjects) is geared towards and focused on the goal of studying physics at university. This is, of course, my opinion as a physicist.

How could I opinion be anything different? Physics is the subject that deals with the nature of physical reality itself! Only physicists peel back the veneer of what appears to be real to see what is happening underneath, and the cogs that turn to drive reality are too weird to the uninitiated to be adequately explained in a few words. No, we need a rigorous comprehensive mathematical framework and a new language (the language of physics) to describe what is really going on.

A student asked me this week what the difference was being randomness and chaos, and why we say the motion of particles in a gas only appears random (but is better described as being chaotic), whereas nuclear decay actually is random. I started to explain the nature of chaos, of there being so many variables, and any one of them being slightly different makes the outcome hard to predict because of how many moving parts there are. I then started to explain why nuclear decay is a quantum phenomenon and at its core quantum mechanics is probabilistic because wave functions that describe particles are related to probability density functions. I realised the student had got quite lost and I had done a poor job of explaining it. I do not usually have to explain it, so I have not practised an explanation, nor given it much thought or planning. University lecturers have thought carefully about how to explain this higher level understanding, and have planned and practised their explanations a lot. It is not satisfying to tell a student, “you will learn about that at university,” but really, that is the only place where they will develop the insight of a physicist.

In another example, yesterday a colleague asked me to explain why moving charges have magnetic fields around them. Ah, this touches on special relativity, which I have taught for years and have planned and practised teaching. I explained to him about length contraction (and that was enough to cause him difficulties, before I even got on to how magnetic fields are a convenient way of simplifying what is actually a geometrically complicated distortion of spacetime causing a change in charge density in different reference frames such that bodies that appear neutral in one reference frame – and thus produce no force on charged particles nearby – can be charged in another – and thus produce electric forces, but only in those moving reference frames). For simplicity, we call these electric forces that are caused by spacetime warping “magnetic forces”. Nope, I lost him with the fundamentals of space contraction and had to go back to basics about Galilean co-ordinate transformations and the problems is causes with moving charges and the Michelson-Morley experiment disproving the existence of a luminiferous aether and the Lorentz transformation being used instead which agreed with observation and the relationship between length contraction and time dilation and the lack of absolute simultaneity and so on. I tried to cram all of that into a quick five minute talk. My colleague almost understood it, but really students would need to spend many many lessons learning this stuff before being able to access this stuff.

This is the stuff that physicists do physics for! To get a better understanding of the nature of physical reality! I cannot express how grateful I truly am to my university. I did not get good A-Level results (due to a few factors, but I must accept responsibility for discovering alcohol and heavy metal music, in both of which I participated irresponsibly). I was accepted on a Physics course at the University of Salford, which transformed my life for the better. There I met my wife, made friends, and discovered who I truly am. The lecturers at the university opened my eyes to Physics, and helped me to see the nature of physical reality in ways no-one else ever had.

The beauty and wonder of physical reality is what drives me to teach Physics. I want everyone to be able to see what I have seen and understand what I understand. In schools we have a captive audience. Captive indeed; they have to study physics whether they like it or not. I intend to make them like it, and to inspire them to want to study it at university. To do that, I have to get them through the fundamentals, the rudiments, the scales and arpeggios of physics. It may not be glamorous using a ruler and a stopwatch to determine how fast a car is moving, but it is a necessary step. Armchair education specialists will decry science teaching and the curriculum, but I think it is actually pretty good and I cannot think of much I would want to change.

Physics transcends borders and backgrounds. It is tangible and real and should be accessible to all. My mission is to enable as many people to study physics at university as possible.

It is a shame and a national scandal that university courses are now only considered viable options if they directly link to the promise of higher future salaries and job security. That is partly due to the cost of university education becoming so high, so the £28000+ for fees (plus the cost of accommodation, food, books, pens, computers, bills, and maybe even a social life) needs to be weighed against the future benefit to the student. I understand that students may be reluctant to push themselves into debt to study a course that will not help them to earn money in the long run. University education should be about self discovery, about discovering who you are. It’s a happy side-effect that if you do a Physics degree, you also end up with a qualification that opens lots of doors to higher paying and more secure careers.

So that is where I come in. As I mentioned, my mission is to enable people to go to university and study physics. To do that, they need a good A-Level (or equivalent) in Physics. To get that, they need a good GCSE (or equivalent) in Physics. I can help!

Need a physics or astronomy tutor? Yup, I do that.

Need a past paper marked for your revision? Yup, I do that too.

Need a qualified and experienced examiner to do a past paper walkthrough masterclass? Yup, me again.

Need some resources, worksheets, or notes about a topic you’re finding challenging? Yup, look no further.

Need some video lessons about a topic? Yup, they’re all on the dashboard.

Whatever your GCSE or A-Level physics, or GCSE Astronomy needs, you can find it all here: https://physicswithkeith.com/

Some tutors charge a lot for these sorts of services, and why shouldn’t they? They’re professionals, qualified, and experienced. These sorts of services are highly sought after, and there aren’t that many qualified and experienced physics teachers out there. In a profession that has seen decades of real-terms reductions in income, I can completely understand why a teacher with the experience and qualifications might seek to supplement their income by supporting others.

I don’t see Physics with Keith like that. I used to offer it for free (but paradoxically, people didn’t engage as much with it then). I offer it as a gift. There are still tutees who don’t pay because they cannot afford to, and that’s absolutely fine! It’s not a scam! There are plenty of other tutees who see the value in what I’m offering and want to pay to support what I’m doing. That’s fine too.

Why would I offer this for free? I am a Head of Department, and a UPS3 teacher. I’m at the top of the salary ladder for teachers. The only way for me to earn more is to step into senior leadership, which would take me away from the classroom. I love teaching and helping young people become physicists. It is my vocation, what some might call my “calling.” I earn enough at school. I’m in the fortunate position not to be desperate for money. (However, in the last month, our dishwasher broke down, our washing machine broke down, our roof started to leak, our central heating system gushed water everywhere and the catalytic converter in our car needed replacing – that was a huge strain on a teacher salary, even for a Head of Department on UPS3 😂)

I offer Physics with Keith for a very low price so that it is accessible to all. If you cannot afford that low price, just contact me. If you can afford the fee, it’ll help me cover the cost of the website hosting, domain, and whiteboard license. It will also help keep the lights on and the broadband connected.

So concludes my long and egocentric ramble.