The standing vertical jump (SVJ) is a classical topic in Newtonian mechanics (Fig. 1). Although the topic has also been treated by others (other terms used are "standing high jump" or "squat jump"), the present paper shows how a smartphone can be used to capture video of a jump and determine the jump height. A crucial…

In high school, and also in introductory physics courses in higher levels of schooling, the law of universal gravitation of planets is introduced by postulating Johannes Kepler's three laws, and later Isaac Newton's law of the inverse of the square of the distance to the Sun. The justification of the laws is only achieved in advanced courses in…

Experimental results are presented concerning the motion of a ball that bounces up an incline a few times then bounces back down again. The number of bounces up the incline is typically small since the speed of the ball in a direction parallel to the incline decreases rapidly, not only during each bounce but also while the ball is in the air. The…

From my home on the west bank of the Columbia River in Richland, Washington (46.3°N latitude), I have an unobstructed view of the sunrise along the east bank during an entire year. As a retirement project after a career of teaching and research in physics, I decided to take photographs of the sunrise for a year and, and at the same time, carry out…

In the movie Gravity, American astronaut and scientist Dr. Stone (Sandra Bullock) is on a spacewalk when tragedy suddenly strikes. An ever-increasing field of debris caused by a destroyed spy satellite damages the Hubble and Space Shuttle and quickly wipes out their mission. Dr. Stone spends the rest of the movie trying to find a ride back home.

As part of their third-year general chemistry program, students at the University of the Côte d'Azur are taught the basics of radioactivity. The view that third-year university students have of the periodic Table of the Elements is often reduced because it ignores the vast majority of isotopes. As part of this program, a practicum devoted to the…

Modern MEMs gyros/accelerometers allow the angular velocity of pendula to be precisely measured and the angular acceleration to be calculated. For a compound pendulum, "I"[subscript p][umlaut over theta]=-"mga" sin[theta]Ip[umlaut over theta]=-mgasin[theta], where "a" is the distance of the center of mass from the…

In nature, we often observe interesting phenomena for which we would like to find a physical explanation. One such phenomenon is presented in this paper.

The Physics Teacher has published over the years many inspiring papers with an historical slant and we agree with Thomas B. Greenslade, who recently wrote that teaching physics is about "integrating physics with human culture.… if we are going to leave a lasting impact on our students, we should do more than teach them pure physics."…

The use of texts is an indispensable resource for students' learning, especially in science domains. While developing understanding of a specific topic usually is the main goal of reading expository texts, an important consideration is how to best measure whether this understanding has been reached. In this study, we aimed to analyze gains in…

One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between formal physical principles and personal experience. However, research has shown that awareness of connections between the abstract and the experiential tends to deteriorate, sometimes significantly, after instruction in…

In physics education, the topic of electromagnetic induction is an important but also challenging topic for many students. The early introduction of formulae, e.g., Faraday's law of induction, seems to hinder rather than to foster the understanding of the topic's underlying principles. In this paper, we present the basic idea for a teaching…

It has long been suspected by general relativists that physicists who do not specialize in general relativity (GR) believe that special relativity (SR) is incapable of modeling dynamics within accelerated reference frames. Consequently, many physicists may conclude that certain phenomena, such as time dilation due to acceleration, can only be…

Of the many disciplines that rely on calculus, physics is among those with the strongest connections to this branch of mathematics. For instance, the derivative--one of the key notions of calculus--is used to describe velocity and acceleration, which play a central role in mechanics. In post-secondary education, in particular at the college level,…

In this paper, we propose a simple yet generic and versatile method to measure the position of a moving body as a function of time. Apart from very basic equipment such as carts and wheels, only a laser pointer or a similar device and a smartphone are necessary. By attaching a source of light to a cart and video filming its movement on a…