About Me

My name is Franco Normani, and I live in Ontario, Canada. I have always done a lot of physics, in school and on my own time. Physics, in general, has always been a passion of mine. I've always been fascinated by the fact that you can predict the movement of something when under the influence of something else; namely a force. It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I really started to get into it. To many people, physics is something that just gets harder the "higher up" you go. But to me it just got more interesting, and so it was something I was willing to put the time in to really understand. This trend continued throughout university, and even after graduation. I would always find myself going back to my physics textbooks just to brush up on a concept, or maybe just as a resource to help solve a physics problem I stumbled upon in my daily routine, and was curious to find the answer to.

My view has always been that physics is most difficult to people who don't really like physics. It's like anything, if you don't like it enough you won't have the motivation to get really good at it, and push through the learning curve. As a result, it will always be "too hard". For this reason, I think passion always precedes talent. You got to love it before you can get great at it.

It's not the other way around – you don't love it because you're good at it. You're good at it because you love it.

And so, I created this website because I wanted to convey the world of physics in an appreciable way, one in which you can see for yourself why physics is important. And I do this by showing how physics applies to real world problems, which is one of the best strategies for sparking interest.

This website would not have been possible without Solo Build It! The huge help they provide in creating an online business is the reason I have this website. I did all the hard work in creating all the content, but they gave me a road map on how to go about doing it in a way that works harmoniously with search engines to get visitor traffic. This is not a product review website, but I'll make an exception here.

So outside of physics, what else am I interested in? Well, I really like Stirling engines. It is one of my life goals to build one!

I also like dogs a lot, and have written about them here.

I strive to make this website unique in terms of the type of content it has. Other physics websites typically follow the classroom/textbook model of explaining physics, and as a result end up being a dry read. The physics is not connected very well to the real world, or at least not in interesting ways, and most students fail to engage. The point of this website is to engage people and make it clear where physics is actually used and why it is important. That does not mean that I make the physics easy for everyone (that can't be done anyway), but rather that I give you lots of examples of physics that is relatable to your everyday experiences. The best examples of this are in my physics of sports page.

I go the extra mile when I explain physics. This means that I redo pages over and over again until I get them just right. This means making sure that the physics explanations and diagrams are as accurate as I can make them, and that they are as clear as possible. Now, I certainly don't have the brand-name authority that, say, a college or university website has in terms of its physics content, but I do make it a point of presenting the material in a "friendlier" way which engages better.

However, at the same time I realize that credibility is important when teaching physics. You don't want to be taught the wrong things after all! So that's why I'm adding these next paragraphs for those that want to know my qualifications.

I have a bachelor's degree (1999) and master's degree (2004) in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo. The reference information for my master's thesis is: "Normani F.V., Analytical modeling of tube bending with hydroforming, Master Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2004". You can view my bachelor's diploma here, and my master's diploma here.

Outside of creating all the content on this website, I have also created hundreds of physics videos for Chegg – a large education technology company – in which I explain solutions to physics problems.

I have done some science writing on the side for AZoCleantech.

The work I've done on Stirling engines is cited in several places, such as:

"Design, build and testing of a concentrating solar dish system", Z. Feng, Murdoch University, Bachelor of Engineering thesis, 2017. See reference [44].

"Effect of coupling parameters on the performance of Fluidized Bed Combustor - Stirling Engine for a microCHP System", S. Lombardi et al., Energy Procedia, Volume 75, 2015. See reference [11].

If you'd like to contact me, you can do so through my contact page.


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