I just flew out of PWM this weekend. I saw the new EHF scanner but didn't see it in use at all. I wouldn't be shocked if they never even turn the thing on at PWM. I'm also much more okay with the millimeter wave machines than x-ray backscatter. Non-ionizing radiation, but I would like to see a proper study on the effects of whatever dose of EHF that emits on people.

Your guess is pretty much correct. You and others have suggested MTW, so I'm going to get a hold of that as soon as this damn hurricane passes. Thanks!

That's a little unfair, I think. I'm asking for help in becoming an "armchair physicist" if you will, not a PhD. I want to get through the material and learn it to better my own understanding, not to master it and get into research. It's not as though I didn't google the subject, but if you went with that approach for a complex subject that you didn't already understand, you'd realize it's hard to know which path provides any sort of focus for what you want to understand. For instance, if you have a small company that needs to raise cash and want to know the details of American Securities Law, you might google it and get a little overwhelmed with the overlap of the states' Blue Sky laws, Exchange Act, etc. I, on the other hand, could pare the list down to what you might need to research to understand how to issue stock for your small, closely held corporation. It's a good intermediate step to have an expert filter your reading list, after all.

It's easy to call me lazy if you know the material and I don't, because you can look at what's out there and sort the material into "important," "good to know" and "discard" lists.

The real question is, did you really want me to actually put what I've already read and have queued up to read in the submission? I suppose I could have done that, but I've gotten some succinct responses already that suggest a totally different path than I've already started down. Maybe I wouldn't have received such good information otherwise.

In any case, I do appreciate the folks that have responded constructively. I'm lazy but I'm not that bad. Jeez.

but... but... I googled! I swear. Thanks for the link!

Thanks for responding. It was the order of things that probably confused me the most, so I'l give vector/matrix math a shot and then try to work through Newtonian physics. I've had a course in Newtonian physics, but it wasn't calculus-based, so that probably didn't teach me anything other than an overview of the concepts.