Written and produced by three of my former students (Kenneth Hall, Heather Kotwas, Sarah Chakales) the following video shows three superheros doing battle using concepts in projectile motion that they learned in physics class.
They also poke fun at some of my quirks, specifically my use of made up words such as “detangify”, the manner in which I pronounce “components”, and my insistence on using “ph” to spell “phun”. Basically, anytime they do or say something that seems odd in the video, they are making fun of me.
This is the first video in our homework problem solution series. It is a classic example of a one-dimensional motion problem most students would encounter in an introductory physics class.
The problem: I go outside and climb onto the roof of the building. I drop a rock off of the top and with a stopwatch I time how long the rock takes to reach the ground. The stopwatch reads 2 seconds when the rock hits the ground. How tall is the building?
Click on the video below to see the solution worked out in real time. The text in the video is impossible to read, but it is just the problem above written out. Future videos will have this problem corrected. The actual problem solving is clear.
If you do not see the video above, then you do not have Macromedia Flash. You can check out the video in Quicktime and/or download the latest Flash player here
If you have questions about this solution, then please ask them in the forums.
Written and produced by my former student, Jennifer Seese, the following video provides an entertaining introduction to the concept of momentum and its conservation. Click play.
If you do not see the video above, then you do not have Macromedia Flash. You can check out the video in Quicktime and/or download the latest Flash player here
A former student of mine, Daniel Casanova, wrote and produced the following video exposing the fraud that is centrifugal force. For an entertaining tutorial on circular motion, click play.
If you do not see the video above, then you do not have Macromedia Flash. You can check out the video in Quicktime and/or download the latest Flash player here.
NASA scrubbed its “Teachers in Space” program after the tragic Challenger accident that led to the death of Christa McAuliffe. The program was reintroduced nearly a decade later, only to be slowed to a near halt along with the entire shuttle program with the break-up of Columbia over Texas. I was teaching high-school right before the last disaster, and with the backing of administrators at my school, I was preparing an application to become a teacher in space. Although NASA has stated that the program will go on, I doubt we will see teachers floating in NASA space shuttles anytime soon. (They have been floating in planes, though.)
Ahhh, but while they may not be floating around in NASA shuttles, they could find themselves strapped to private rockets such as SpaceShipOne or Rocketplane Kistler. The Space Frontier Foundation’s Teachers in Space program has been announced, though there are very few details.
The privately organized Teachers in Space project got off to a good start in April, when Armadillo Aerospace, Rocketplane Kistler and XCOR Aerospace announced their participation.
Eventually, the Space Frontier Foundation would like to see a federally funded $20 million program to put teachers on suborbital spaceships - which would help prime the pump for private enterprise in space travel. For now, however, organizers are happy with every privately donated seat they can get.
“Rides to space are what we’re about,” Bill Boland, project manager for Teachers in Space, said in this week’s news release. “Masten Space System’s generosity means another teacher will have the experience of a lifetime. It’s great to have them onboard.”
I’m not sure why SFF would necessarily need federal funds. It seems like private companies are falling over each other to offer free flights to qualified teachers. Of course they are! It’s business. If a private space flight is only supposed to cost ~$250,000, then that’s a small price to pay for some pretty serious national press. The first few flights are guaranteed to be national news, and every flight thereafter will at least make local news in the teachers home area.
My only hope is that they will consider college level teachers as well, so that I may revisit old, nearly forgotten dreams.
Here is an interesting story about a group of teachers floating in freefall during the “Weightless Flights of Discovery” program, sponsored by the aerospace company Northrop Grumman in cooperation with Zero Gravity Corp.
On one level, the exercise gives educators a chance to demonstrate the laws of physics in an environment like nothing on Earth: Objects in motion (like those plush toys) really stay in motion rather than falling to the floor. Surface tension turns those squirts of water into floating, glistening spheres. CD players and bicycle wheels go into a stable spin like gyroscopes.
“That’s the way physics teaching is all the time,” said Jeff Klein of Cleveland’s Gilmour Academy. “We’ve got great toys.”
Great toys indeed.
Hey, Northrop Grumman — if you need a physicist blogger to float around for a few hours, then I’m your guy.
I’ve just wasted about an hour playing on a new search engine called Trumalia.com. If you like riddles, then you’ll have a great time traipsing through their search engine. In addition to more than 2,000 challenging questions on topics such as art identification and the history of science, Trumalia also features several difficult enigmas and a high-quality contemporary art gallery. Members meet in the forum to discuss everything from art to the Trumalia enigmas to current events.
Check out the site. If you can decipher their “enigmas” then you win $1,000, with the possibility for more:
For retrieving one artifact and providing the required deciphered message, you will receive a check for $1,000. This is in addition to the value of the artifact itself, which is considerable. Our hope is that the $1,000 will help defray any travel expenses associated with your journey to the site.
For solving all four enigmas, you will win the entire purse. The purse grows substantially each day. Initially worth thousands of dollars, it continually expands in connection with the number of people like you who use our search engine. Our hope is that the purse will cross into the tens of thousands, if not more, before all four enigmas are solved.
Even better, if you’re a smart chap, you can earn Amazon points by answering questions that come up in search results. It’s pretty neat. The whole idea is to get you to use their search engine. I’m still slogging through the first Enigma. I haven’t gotten very far.
Among scientists the title of this post is not at all controversial. But among evangelical Christians, the topic is open to debate. I’m currently working on a longer article about what is an isn’t science, but I thought I’d take a quick break and jump into this topic. It is important, because there is a growing movement promoting the teaching of Intelligent Design along side evolution in public school science classes.
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Based on this statement alone, and without examining the implications, it is fairly easy to conclude that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. To begin, what makes a theory scientific? For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must be:
Consistent
Parsimonious
Useful
Empirically testable & falsifiable
Based upon multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments
Correctable & dynamic
Progressive
Provisional or tentative.
A good scientific theory is all of these things, but in order to be considered remotely scientific a theory must meet at least most of these conditions. Intelligent Design does not. Intelligent Design relies on accepting a priori that an intelligent designer constructed the universe. And since this intelligent designer is “outside” nature, there is no way to prove this assertion. This does not make the assertion necessarily incorrect, just unfalsifiable and therefore un-scientific. And since Intelligent Design is founded on an un-testable axiom (by definition neither provisional or tentative), it is far from dynamic.
But even accepting as axiom (on faith) the existence of an intelligent designer (which I do), it does not necessarily follow that evolution is bunk, and that the Earth is 6,000 years old. This requires acceptance of a VERY literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, which would also lead one to the conclusion that the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe. In fact, Intelligent Design proponents come to varied conclusions about its implications — from those who claim that the Universe literally was created in six days, to respected scientists who simply believe that God created the universe in the manner modern science describes. I would fall into the latter camp, though I’m not sure how respected I am. Because of the wide disparity of conclusions that can be drawn from Intelligent Design premises, it fails to be useful in describing nature and is far from progressive (in that, say, Newton’s Gravitational laws cannot be reasonably derived from ID).
Although a theological argument can definitely be made for an “intelligent designer”, the claim that it is science is fraud. I personally believe God created the heaven and the Earth. My claim that there is an intelligent designer (God) is not a scientific statement; it is theological. A belief in God cannot be based on science, nor does a certain belief have to be scientific to be acceptable. But as a scientist I have to look at the data, and the data suggests that the Earth (and the universe) is much older than 10,000 years. And that life evolved. This doesn’t call into question my faith in God. The complexity of the natural world actually strengthens my faith. I would argue that the Big Bang is the manner in which God created the universe and that planetary and biological evolution was and is His plan. Dr. Moreland, author of “Love Your God With All Your Mind”, states the following:
Now, when it comes to the…flat earth and the rising and the setting of the sun: it was scientific evidence that caused people to say ‘maybe we’d better re-look at those passages.’ So now the question was raised by the church interpreters: ‘Is there anything essential to this passage that’s violated if we take the four corners of the earth to be metaphorical?’ Now, their answer was, in that particular passage, ‘no.’ That particular text can allow for that without violating the teachings of the scriptures in that particular text. Now, is this procedure risky in other passages? You bet. But does it follow that it should never be applied? No, you’ve gotta take texts–each text, on its own. So, the devil’s in the details, and you’ve got to be very, very careful.
If scientific evidence suggests that life evolved via natural selection, then Christians should re-examine their understanding of the manner in which God created man. Natural selection may have been His intention and plan. There is no need to create a false “science” to justify His continued existence and importance in our lives.
The world is as God created it. Who are you or I to question the manner in which He created it. We can merely explore that creation through actual science.
Because of the wide disparity of conclusions that can be drawn from Intelligent Design premises, it fails to be useful in describing nature and is far from progressive (in that, say, Newton’s Gravitational laws cannot be reasonably derived from ID).