Hi there! My name is Maxwell, and here’s what I looked like studying physics in college:
Physics is my absolute favorite thing to learn about in the world, yet I spent much of my undergraduate years feeling confused, frustrated, and just plain dumb. In order to learn the profound and elegant secrets of the universe that physics promised it could teach me, it seemed I had to follow a 3-step process:
- wade through pages of dense mathematical calculations that required all sorts of hand-wavy rules I didn’t understand yet was expected to know
- use these equations to solve homework problems orders of magnitude more difficult than what the professor explained in class
- move on to the next topic before I understood why this was profound or elegant or even all that important
I eventually graduated with honors from Harvard majoring in Physics and Chemistry, but after I left school I couldn’t help wonder if there was a better way to learn physics. Physics is hard, but it shouldn’t feel impossible. What if there were clear, thorough, concept-first explanations for all the key topics ? What if practice problems actually made you feel like you learned something? What if you didn’t need to wait until upper-level courses before you got to the illuminating insights that made you interested in physics in the first place?
Max’s Demons is the resource I wished I had in college. “Explained” articles unpack key topics, focusing on physical concepts and using those to guide the mathematical derivation. I try to answer the questions students have that textbooks never seem to (Why are we allowed to use infinity? What is the point of potential energy?) I’ve also tried to make it easy on the eyes – the last thing I wanted to see when solving a problem at 3 in the morning was wall-to-wall 8 point font with neon-blue equations that look like they were typeset with an actual typewriter.
Let me know how I’m doing! I have plans for additional content that I’ll share when they’re ready to go, but in the meantime if you have a topic you’d like me to explain or an idea on how to improve this website, send me a message here!