Moving along through our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we come to the next important physical quantity, angular momentum. For some obscure reason, this gets the symbol L, and the angular momentum for a single particle about some point A is given by: This is probably the most deceptive equation we’ll see this season. Yesterday’s definition… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Angular Momentum
Category: Science
The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” — Mark Twain In last night’s post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn’t… Continue reading The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Working for a Living
Following the basic pattern established at the start of our seasonal countdown to Newton’s birthday, today’s equation defines a piece that was left hanging in yesterday’s post: This is the technical definition of “work” in physics terms. It’s also probably the scariest-looking equation to this point, as it explicitly involves vector calculus– there’s an integral… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Working for a Living
The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
It’s hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another “imminent death of publishing” article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There’s one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table… Continue reading The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
For the sixth day of our advent countdown to Newton’s birthday, we have the first equation that really departs from the usual notation. I’ve gotten to kind of like the way the Matter and Interactions curriculum handles this, though, so we’ll use their notation: This is what Chabay and Sherwood refer to as the Energy… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa, Kiyoshi Kawabata, and Verte Corp.
I’m still getting back up to speed with the blog, as well as the huge backlog of stuff I’ve read during the past few months when I was too busy to blog. Thus, I am semi-officially proclaiming this Book Review Week. I’ll post one review a day of books I was sent by publishers looking… Continue reading The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa, Kiyoshi Kawabata, and Verte Corp.
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Energy
Moving along in our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we start to deal with equations that Sir Isaac never would’ve seen, because they deal with more abstract quantities than he worked with. The first and in some ways most important of these is energy: This is the full and correct expression for the energy of a… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Energy
The Advent Calendar of Physics: The Spring’s the Thing
Continuing our countdown to Newton’s birthday, let’s acknowledge the contributions of one of his contemporaries and rivals with today’s equation: This is, of course, Hooke’s Law for a spring, which he famously published in 1660: ceiiinosssttuv Clears everything right up, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not. This one’s not only in Latin, it’s a cryptogram, unscrambling… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: The Spring’s the Thing
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton and Einstein
We kicked off the countdown to Newton’s birthday with his second law of motion, which is almost but not quite everything you need to understand and predict the motion of objects. The missing piece is today’s equation: This is the full and correct definition of momentum, good for any speed all the way up to… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton and Einstein
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Action and Reaction
We kicked off our countdown to Newton’s birthday with his second law of motion, so the obvious next step is to go to his third law of motion: This one was also originally in Latin, because that’s how Ike liked to roll: Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Action and Reaction