Musk's Rocket Science
A physics and chemistry field guide for curious minds — written to be understood with no prior background, but rigorous enough to leave you with real equations, real numbers and real intuition.
7 chapters published
How to read this series
Each chapter starts in plain language and ends with real equations, worked examples and questions to test yourself. No prior background is assumed — but nothing is hand-waved either. Chapters build on each other, so reading in order pays off, though each is written to stand alone.
Part 1
Electricity Basics
What electricity actually is, from subatomic particles up to Ohm’s Law — the foundation everything else in the series rests on.
What Even Is Electricity?
Reasoning from first principles — the way great engineers do — applied to the electrons under your fingertips.
Electricity is the coordinated movement of loosely-held valence electrons. This chapter builds that from scratch: atomic structure, why charge comes in indivisible packets, Coulomb’s Law with worked numbers, the startling truth about how slowly electrons actually move, and the triboelectric physics behind ESD control in gigafactories. It closes by walking the voltage ladder of the modern energy stack, from a 70mV nerve impulse to a 500kV HVDC link.
Voltage, Current & Resistance
Meet the three quantities that describe every circuit ever built — and the equations, real numbers and safety limits behind each one.
Voltage is energy per unit charge, current is the rate of charge flow, and resistance is what opposes it. This chapter defines each rigorously with its own equation, worked through real grid-scale numbers — BESS discharge energy, busbar sizing, fault currents — explains why conventional current runs backwards to the electrons, and covers the current thresholds that actually determine electrical danger.
Ohm's Law
The single equation that ties voltage, current and resistance together — and explains everything from BMS shunt sizing to why grid-scale BESS voltage sags under load.
V = IR is the payoff for Chapters 1 and 2. This chapter derives its three forms, graphs it, and applies it to real decisions: sizing a BMS current-sense shunt, predicting a traction motor’s 14,000A stall current, and why the same 400V DC bus is a non-event in rated PPE and potentially fatal without it. It closes with non-Ohmic devices — electrolyser cells, power semiconductors — and the internal resistance that makes every real battery string sag under load.
AC vs. DC Current
Why your wall socket and your battery fundamentally disagree — and the bitter 1880s corporate war that decided how the modern world gets wired.
Every equation so far assumed current flows steadily in one direction. That holds for a battery and fails the moment you plug into a wall socket. This chapter covers the sine wave, why “230V” actually peaks at 325V at a data centre PDU, the Edison–Westinghouse War of Currents, and the I²R physics that decided it — then shows where DC quietly won anyway: BESS strings, electrolyser stacks, solar plants and every EV drivetrain.
Series vs. Parallel Circuits
How real battery packs, grid-scale BESS installations, solar arrays and wind collector systems are actually wired — and why the wiring topology determines everything from failure modes to fault tolerance.
Every real energy system is an exercise in deciding what to connect in series and what to connect in parallel. This chapter works through Kirchhoff’s two laws and then applies them to actual architecture: a 16S e-rickshaw pack, a 16S16P BESS rack scaling to 82kWh, a 990V solar string and what partial shading does to it, an offshore wind collector network, a 130-cell electrolyser stack, and the N-1 redundancy behind grid transmission and data centre A/B feeds.
Power, Energy & Watts
Why a 100MW BESS and a 100MW/400MWh BESS are two completely different machines — and the one distinction that governs every spec sheet in the energy industry.
Power is the rate; energy is the rate sustained over time. This chapter derives P = VI = I²R = V²/R from earlier chapters, walks the power ladder from a 7kW home charger to a 1.6GW reactor, and then lands on the distinction that trips up more people in this industry than any other: why a storage project must be quoted as both MW and MWh, and how their ratio — duration — decides which grid service it can actually provide.
Fuses, Switches & Circuit Breakers
The devices that stand between every fault current Chapter 3 predicted and a fire — and why interrupting a DC arc is fundamentally harder than an AC one.
A 14,000A stall current and an 80,000A capacitor inrush both need something standing between them and a fire. This chapter covers how fuses, breakers, precharge circuits and ground-fault devices actually interrupt a fault: the I²t let-through energy that decides fuse selection, the two-stage TCC curve of a breaker, why a DC arc has no zero-crossing to help extinguish it, and how selective coordination keeps one faulted rack from taking down a whole site.
More chapters are being written. This series is planned to run to a hundred chapters. New chapters appear here as they are published.