Category Archives: physics

Double pendulum roller coaster FIXED

Posted on February 28, 2015 by

My last post was wrong. I’m to blame. But in thinking about it and talking about it with with lots of helpful friends I ended up learning a ton. Here’s the upshot: There were kinks in the roller coaster loop … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics | 6 Comments

Double pendulum roller coaster

Posted on February 26, 2015 by

I’ve been doing a lot of modeling of beads on wires lately, but today I discovered something that really surprised me. The surprise came when I found a bead/wire system that seemed to violate conservation of energy. Now, it turns … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics | 6 Comments

Lagrange multipliers revisited

Posted on February 25, 2015 by

I spent the last few days trying to decide whether to teach Lagrange multipliers in my Theoretical Mechanics course. Ultimately I decided to go ahead and do it and I wanted to get down my thoughts on why and what … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, syllabus creation, teaching | Leave a comment

What does the conducting paper lab teach?

Posted on November 12, 2014 by

At my school we have a lab for electric fields/potentials where they measure potentials at different locations on a piece of conducting paper that has been attached to a power supply (the + lead and – lead of the power … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, mathematica, physics | 5 Comments

Ampère’s law

Posted on October 21, 2014 by

Tomorrow I’m covering we’re working on Ampere’s law in my calc-based general physics course. In preparation I was looking around at different ways to present it, and I realized that I was getting crabby about most of the presentations I … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, syllabus creation | 4 Comments

I hate Kirchhoff’s loop law

Posted on October 7, 2014 by

Sorry for the incendiary title, but it does express my feelings pretty well. When analyzing DC circuits, students are often encouraged to use the two Kirchhoff’s laws: [sometimes called the node law] all current flowing into a node must flow … Continue reading →

Posted in physics, teaching | 14 Comments

String resonance

Posted on October 4, 2014 by

My friend Will posted a cool animation today: GIF of the forced fixed string envelope showing nodes/antinodes for different k values. Driver on left. http://t.co/nCZh93arYa — Will Slaton (@wslaton) October 4, 2014 It got me thinking about the lab we … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematica, physics, twitter | 6 Comments