Some sections will be at an elementary level. They will be in a different font (sans-serif, which appears less formal) and will have a colored bar in the left margin. The idea is to look more like an undergrad textbook, which tend to have "friendlier" fonts and colored margin or "box" indicators. Figure 1: Graphs of propagating coherent wave. (Mouse-over to see animation.) These sections will contain minimal equations, less details, and lots of pictures. They will be written in the style of, say, Science News or Scientific American, appropriate for the classic "the intelligent layman". My intended prerequisite for this text is a course in modern physics, which is usually at the level of college freshmen or sophomores. Does this work with a short paragraph?

Other sections will be at an advanced level, and they will use a Times-Roman or serif font and just be plain black on white. The idea is to look more like an advanced textbook, such as those typeset by LaTeX.

Such sections will have a fair number of equations, and to put them on the web, I am leaning toward using GIF files and keeping the source LaTeX code in the comments in my HTML source. Here is an example of the Schrodinger equation:

(3.1)

And of course we will need graphs in the advanced section, too. Here is how that looks:

Figure 2: Graphs of a wave packet. Note how difficult it is to see the packet. (Mouse-over to see animation.)

I don't yet know which sections will be longer on average, the elementary or the advanced. I'll have to actually write some of it to see.

Scott Johnson,   2009