The 1884 book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions," written by Edwin Abbott, has captured the interest of numerous generations, and has also been used in schools to help students learn and think about the concept of dimension in a creative, fun way. In 2007, a film was released called "Flatland: The Movie," and over one…

A science video blog, which has gone viral, shows a wooden block shot by a vertically aimed rifle. The video shows that the block hit dead center goes exactly as high as the one shot off-center. (Fig. 1). The puzzle is that the block shot off-center carries rotational kinetic energy in addition to the gravitational potential energy. This leads a…

During the last few years teaching physics, I have noticed that my students are becoming more and more interested in the topic of radiation. Mobile phones, modern game consoles, and WiFi--all of these devices involving some kind of radiation are part of our students' everyday lives. Students are also frequently confronted in the media with…

In May, we noted that the percentage of women among physics faculty members reached 14% in 2010. The 14% is a new high--the continuation of a trend seen since we began measuring these data in 1998 when it was 8%. This growth in women's representation is seen at all levels of the professoriate--from instructors through full professors. In…

My academic ancestors in physics have called on me once more to tell you about the apparatus that they devised, and that many of you have used in your demonstrations and labs. This article is about apparatus named after François Arago, Heinrich Helmholtz, Leon Foucault, and James Watt.

Helping students develop an understanding of how to interpret experimental data trends is an important part of the introductory physics laboratory. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues have lamented that too many of their students do this poorly. This is a common refrain, and past research has already revealed student difficulties with…

This is not a treatise on optics or the index of refraction. It is merely a demonstration that will surprise and engage many of your students. We have all put a pencil in a beaker of water and observed how it appears to bend. Not so much fun or engaging, is it? Why not illustrate this optical effect by taking your students spearfishing?…

Maxwell's discovery of the relation between electricity, magnetism, and light was one of the most important ones in physics. With his added displacement current term, Maxwell showed that the equations of electricity and magnetism produced a radiation solution, electromagnetic (EM) radiation, that traveled with a speed of c=1/v(e0µ0). The…

In this article we propose an activity aimed at introductory students to help them understand the Stefan-Boltzmann and Wien's displacement laws. It only requires simple materials that are available at any school: an incandescent lamp, a variable dc energy supply, and a computer to run an interactive simulation of the blackbody spectrum.…

Many students have owned or seen fluids toys in which two immiscible fluids within a closed container can be tilted to generate waves. These types of inexpensive and readily available toys are fun to play with, but they are also useful for provoking student learning about fluid properties or complex fluid behavior, including drop formation and…

As is true of a far more famous story, it all began a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It even involved a binary star system. A small star, called a white dwarf, had become a burned out husk of its former self and it turned to gorging on hydrogen and helium from its bloated red giant neighbor. The transferred gas reignited the fires of…

Stability is often an important consideration in both static and dynamic systems. While introductory students soon grasp the balance of forces required for constant velocity motion, it generally takes longer for them to reliably identify the various torques involved in producing rotational equilibrium. Accelerating systems have the additional…

In 1974, Professor Eric Laithwaite demonstrated an unusually heavy gyroscope at a Royal Institution lecture in London. The demonstration was televised and can be viewed on YouTube. A recent version of the same experiment, together with partial explanations, attracted two million YouTube views in the first few months. In both cases, the gyroscope…

A study conducted in 2013 showed that about 70-80% of teens and young adults in the United States own a smartphone. Furthermore the number of tablet PC users in the United States will increase up to more than 80% by 2015. As a result, these devices have increasingly become everyday tools, particularly for the younger generation. In recent years,…

The classic experiment to measure the drag coefficient involves dropping coffee filters. Wouldn't it be more fun to try something different? In fact, an experiment on the drag force is conducted nearly 4000 times a day during the baseball season and you have free access to this PITCHf/x data!