Physics Links

General

General physics education resources

• San Francisco's Exploratorium is one of the top science museums in the world. Their web site includes tons of information about various aspects of science, including inquiry based learning activities and web-based lessons.
• PhysicsEd: Physics Education Resources maintained by Alan Cairns, links to a wide variety of resources including e-texts, demos, research, journals & suppliers.
• Eric Max Francis's Physics Page and his Links Page
• The Physics wing of the Nobel e-Museum describes the research of the physics Nobel Laureates which won them the prize.
• The Usenet Physics FAQ is a collection of answers to frequently asked questions on the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.
• Prof. Donald Simanek of Lock Haven University has assembled A Glossary of Frequently Misused or Misunderstood Physics Terms and Concepts New! 5/16/07
• Bruce Bryson has adapted the rather famous film/book The Powers of Ten by Philip and Phyllis Morrison and the office of Charles & Ray Eames. It teaches about scientific notation and length scales in the universe from tiny quarks to the most distant quasars by zooming in and out from a patch of skin on the hand of a sleeping man in a park.
• Garth Huber has collected a small number of Physics-Related Quotations culled mostly from science fiction novels.
• Glenn Elert has compiled a Physics Factbook from contributions of his students. Such facts include measurements of quantities used in typical physics problems gathered from real-life sources.
• The Science Page collects a number of Science Lesson Plans, Labs, and Activities aimed at the K-12 level.
• University of Maryland's Physics Education Research Group (PERG) collects a number of Activity Based Physics Thinking Problems of the type favored by Arons and Mazur, and similar in character to the concept quizzes I use in my classroom (also largely from Mazur and Green). New! 5/16/07

  Physics history

• Here is a rather detailed Physics Time-Line.
• Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was a briliant experimentalist, perhaps best known for his contributions to the unification of the electric and magnetic forces and for developing the concept of a field model of forces. Here are collected his Lectures on the Forces of Matter presented at the Royal Institution in 1859.
• UCLA's physics department has a nice site on the Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics
• Mitchell C. Brown has assembled a number of profiles of African Americans in the Sciences both present and past and by no means exhaustive.
• Offline
  • Gamow, George The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein, Dover Publications, New York, 1961. George Gammow was both a great physicist and a great popularizer of physics. These two books (particularly the second one) also include personal anecdotes of the author's experience with a number of the quantum era physicists. The first book, despite the title, also includes a chapter and scattered bits here and there on pre-Galilean physics, featuring Archemedes in particular.
  • Gamow, George Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, Dover Publications, New York, 1966.
  • Purrington, Robert D. Physics in the Nineteenth Century, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1997.
  • Shamos, Morris H. Great Experiments in Physics: Firsthand Accounts from Galileo to Einstein, Dover Publications, New York, 1959.

  Online courses, textbooks and problems

• Kenneth Kohler's e-book College Physics for Students of Biology and Chemestry
• Burley, Carrington, Kobes and Kunstatter present a series of Introductory Physics Notes for a non-calculus based physics course covering classical mechanics, electromagnetism, light, and some modern physics. Included here are sample problems with solutions.
• The World Lecture Hall's Physics pages link to a number of course sites online.
• Glenbrook South Physics Department presents a number of online tutorials on sundry physics topics in classical mechanics, waves, and optics in their Physics Classroom, all presented at the High School, non-calculus based level.
• The Community Learning Network (CLN) collects a number of Instructional Materials in Physics including both on-site curricular materials grouped by topic and links to off-site physics resources.
• Carl Nave's HyperPhysics Concepts presents a large collection of explanations of physics concepts mainly at the high school/introductory level. The pages often have illuminating figures and calculation widgets. They are all organized through a network of concept maps, originally set up for the old Apple Hypertalk in the pre-www days.
• MIT's Opencourseware project has syllabi, lecture notes, and homework assignments from all their Physics classes. I'm particularly fond of the RealMedia videos of 1999's 8.01/8.02 classes (calculus based introductory mechanics and E&M respectively) presented by Prof. Walter Lewin. New! 5/24/2007
• Aimed at 8th and 9th grade students, Science Insights: Exploring Matter and Energy could use some editing.
• A non-calculus based textbook used by a number of high schools, is Glencoe Science Physics: Principles & Problems Their support page includes interactive practice quizzes, additional sample problems, links and monthly news articles sorted by chapter.
• Serway and Faughn's College Physics is a non-calculus based text, but is more mathematically rigorous than Glencoe's text. This site by the publisher includes resources for the student and instructor for working with the 5th edition. Resources for other editions are also available here. As well as being suitable for non-science majors in college, this text is useful at the high-school level as well.
• One of the more popular, better written calculus based intro physics textbooks is Halliday, Resnick, Walker: Fundamentals of Physics.
• Cambridge Physics Outlet Online presents a number of labs and materials instructions to go with their excellent teaching apparati. I've used this material in my 9th grade physical science classes as well as my 12 grade physics classes but CPO Science also has materials for math and chemestry.
• PASCO scientific maintains a support page for their products which include a number of detectors and gauges with PC interfaces. Their site includes manuals and lab designed for use with their equipment.

  Professional organizations and journals

• The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is the primary profesional organization for physicists in the United States of America.
• The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) is the primary profesional organization for physics teachers in the U.S.A., be they teaching at the undergraduate, high school, or graduate level.
• The Society of Physics Students (SPS) is a member organization of the AIP and is "open to any person interested in physics, promotes the professional development of students, and the professional contributions that students make to the professional community and to society."
• Physics Today is a monthly magazine published by the American Institute of Physics. Its articles are generally at the same level of difficulty as those found in Scienific American. While of particular interest to physicists, and undergraduates who are considering physics as a career or major, interested high school students will find many worthwhile articles within as well.
• PhysicsWeb is associated with the UK magazine PhysicsWorld and presents a number of physics related news articles, several links, and job search services (centered around Europe).
• State of Massachusetts Science & Technology Curriculum Framework for K-12.

  Collections of articles on miscellaneous physics topics

• The physics department at the University of Toronto presents a Physics Virtual Bookshelf, a series of articles on a number of physics topics presented primarily at a conceptual level, with a minimal amount of math involved. Appropriate for high school and above.
• Cartage.org's theme site has a collection of broad Physics Themes articles presenting a wide range of physics concepts and diagrams, setting them in the context of their historical development. Physics 2000, a collection of articles and interactive applets on electromagnetic waves, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, and high-tech devices such as television, lasers, microwave ovens, and liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Much of this is written at the middle to high-school level, without the use of algebra or calculus. Some algebra is involved in a number of articles and some calculus oriented articles have been announced as in the works.
• Here are collected a number of articles of Physics Humor
• If you don't have the proper units attached to your measurements, no one will know what your measurements really mean. Prior to the development of the metric system approximately 200 years ago, a wide variety of units were used throughout the world. A number of Customary Units continue to be used in the English system in the U.S.A. outside of the scientific community. In this page, Russ Howett collects and explains the development of and relationships between sundry traditional English units of measurement.

  Classical Mechanics

  Classical Mechanics is the branch of physics first codified by Isaac Newton, built on a foundation laid by Galileo, Kepler and Descartes. It works out quite well so long as the velocities involved are much less than the speed of light in a vacuum, when relativity kicks in, or if you try to specify the momentum and position or energy and time of an object so closely that quantum uncertainty becomes important. Most everyday situations involving forces, mass, and energy, can be adequately described using classical mechanics.
• In addition to his astronomical discoveries and his popularization of the telescope as an astronomical instrument, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is credited with uncovering the law of inertia as well as recognizing that near the surface of the Earth all bodies fall at the same rate of acceleration. In addition, he recognized that an object's velocity is dependent upon the frame of reference of the observer, and that the motion of an object could be described separately in vertical, and two horizontal dimensions, thus developing the concept of Galilean relativity. Rice University's Galileo Project details much of his history.
• Suggesting that there might be a law of conservation of great physicists, Isaac Newton was born in the year Galileo died. Newton (1642-1713) assembled the basis of much of classical mechanics in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) other copies can be found here and here and here wherein he decribes the relationships between forces, mass and acceleration as well as describes the nature of the force of univeral gravitation. All of these are English translations of the original Latin Principia. Newton was notorious for developing his briliant ideas about mathematics and physics and then not publishing them until much later. Many of the concepts embeded in the Principia were developed by Newton while away from Cambridge during the plague years of 1665-1666. His reticence to publish earlier helped lead to a number of conflicts concerning priority between Newton and his contemporaries such as Leibnitz, Hooke, and Huygens.
• Robert Hooke (1635-1703) lends his name to the law expressing the proportionality between the spring restorative force and the spring's displacement. He wrote of this in his book On Springs in 1678. He also had a famous rivalry with Newton, disputing priority over discoveries in optics and for the law of universal gravitation. This first link on Hooke, comes from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland's History of Mathematics archive.
• Another page on Robert Hooke is courtesy of Dr. Rod Beavon.
• Eric Ludlum maintains Siege Engine.com - a site centered around a Massachusetts group which designs and opperates catapults, trebuchets, and the like. Perfect for projectile motion, torque, potential energy and other mechanics problems.
• One nifty area of the Exploratorium site mentioned above is this section on Skateboard Science
• A number of specifications of the power, angular velocities, and torques of automobile, airplane, and boat motors can be found online. One such place is Marine Turbine Technologies' Turbine Outboard Propulsion page.

  Fluid Dynamics

• The Aeronautics Learning Laboratory for Science technology, and Research (ALLSTAR) Network at Florida International University describes the principles and history of flight in three separate levels (middle school, early high school, late high school/early college). New! 5/18/07
• Jean-Louis Naudin describes The Coanda Effect, a contributor to dynamic lift, with diagrams and videos (in RealMedia format). Henri Coanda described this effect of fluids which flow over a surface tending to follow that surface. New! 5/24/07

  Classical Electromagnetism

  Electricity and magnetism had known of to one degree or another since ancient times. The Greeks recorded that the rubbing of amber with wool caused that wool to be attracted to the amber as far back as 600 BCE.
• The Magnetism Group in the Physics Department of Trinity College Dublin present this History of Magnetism New! 5/17/07
• William Gilbert (1544-1603), physician to Queen Elizabeth published one of the earliest scientific studies on magnetism De Magnete. He also studied and classified a number of materials that were capable of holding electrostatic charges when rubbed - testing more than the traditional amber and jet. This page is a brief biography from the Galileo Project.
• Otto von Guericke is most famous for demonstrating the forces resulting from atmospheric pressure by creating a partial vacuum within the Magdeburg sphere and failing to uncouple the hemispheres, even with teams of horses, before air was returned to the interior of the sphere. He's also credited with developing what may be the first electrostatic generator in 1672, which operated by spining a ball of sulfer against a pad.
• Charles Du Fay (1698-1739) is credited with being the first to classify electrical charge into two fluids: the resinous (which resulted from rubbing substances like amber) and the vitreous (which resulted from rubbing substances like glass) and noting that like fluids repeled, while opposing fluids attracted.
• Pieter van Musschenbroek at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands invented a way to store electrical charge in 1745 in a device which became known as the Leyden Jar. These devices were the first capacitors, and an array of them, just like an array of artilery, became known as a battery.
• The Bizarre Leyden Jar page explains how to construct your own Leyden jar. As does this Leyden jar page.
• Donald Simanek presents one of the better explainations of the dissectible Leyden Jar experiment in this page of Electrostatics demonstrations.
• Twyla Kitts's Leyden Jar page descibes an elementary and middle school level lab for making the devices with pie plates.
• In the 1780's Charles Augustin de Coulomb performed experiments with the torsion pendulum which enabled him to calculate the strength of the electrostatic force. Coulomb's experimental design was copied by Henry Cavendish for his "weighing of the Earth" experiment, which determined the size of the gravitational constant "G" from Newton's law of universal gravitation. This page was written by J.J. O'Connor & E F Robinson.
• Another page on Coulomb can be found here.
• Between 1799 and 1800, Count Alessandro Volta (1745-1827)invented the voltaic pile, essentially a series of capacitors, which was the forerunner of the modern electric battery. Another article on Volta can be found at The Catholic Encyclopedia, with yet another at The Idea Factory
• In 1827, Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854)published his work on electricity which included his law for the proportionality between electric current and potential difference. This biography comes from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
• John Adams presents a thorough guide to Basic Electronics.COM including explanations of the physics behind circuitry.

  Thermodynamics

  Thermodynamics is the study of the affects of internal energy on a system. This includes the study of temperature and of entropy. Entropy is a measure of the disorder in a system. A system with low entropy might have all of its components near one particular energy state. A system with high entropy would have its components in a wide distribution of energy states. A neatly organized room is in a state of low entropy. A desk whose contents are distributed haphazardly about it, with only a few items in their assigned places (socks in a sock drawer for example), would be in a state of high entropy. Modern thermodynamics is highly dependent on mathematical tools from statistics.
• Following Boyle's Law, the Law of Charles & Gay-Lussac, The Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT)is most students' introduction to topic of thermodynamics. this Java-based Gas Law Program by Kirk Haines, John Gelder, and Michael Abraham presents a cross-sectional view of piston enclosing a particle model of an ideal gas model of a helium, neon mixture. The user is able to vary the pressure, temperature, volume, and number densities and watch how the other quantities change, and how the speed distribution of the particles varies.
• The Maxwellian Demon site contains a number of articles and links relating to thermodynamics and its relation to information theory.
• Here's an explaination of Maxwell's Demon and The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
• Tim Graham is the at tributed author of a creative, humorous answer to the exam question: Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic?
• One consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is the looming energy crisis. In Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies, a Physics Today article from the July 2004 issue, Paul B. Weisz examines the demands and supplies of world and U.S. energy from a variety of sources, both renewable and non-renewable. New! 5/17/07

  Vibrations and Waves

• Magius modified a Super Mario World level for a lesson on mechanical waves in Super Mario Physics. This site is blocked from GDRSD computers, probably due to dating service advertisements. New! 5/18/07
• Thomas Young in 1801 demonstrated that light behaves as a wave in his famous Double-Slit interference experiment. In that experiment, Young placed a a source of light behind a pinhole, and alowed that light to enter two slits or pinholes in a barrier beyond. Those slits acted as new sources of light. Because light acts as a wave, when a crest from one source overlaps a crest from the other, the light there adds together and is brighter. Similarly, when a trough overlaps a trough, the light adds together and is brighter. But when a trough from one source overlaps a crest from the other, the two waves cancel each other out and the region is dimmer. This results in an alternating bright-dark pattern of interference fringes on any screen placed beyond the two slits. The spacing of the fringes is dependent on the wavelength of the light and the the spacing of the slits. This Young's Double Slit Applet allows you to examine the results of such an experiment while varying all of the parameters. No math shown, although the parameter dimensions are listed. Young's experiment caused the physics community to consider light as waves rather than as Newton's corpuscular particles - until the dawn of quantum mechanics when we realized that light behaves as both a wave and a particle. At that time it was also realized that electrons and other particles could behave like waves when they went through their own Double-slit interference experiments.
• Joseph Alward collects a number of nice diagrams showing Light Interference. Uses algebra and trigonometry.

  Relativity

  Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity describes how objects behave as they move faster and faster, approaching, but never reaching the speed of light. It also shows how an objects energy and its rest mass (mass when not moving) are proportional to each other and relies on the speed of light being observed as the same by everyone - regardless of what velocities they may be moving relative to each other. Einstein's 1915 expansion to that theory, general relativity, describes how the masses of objects can be seen as bending the fabric of space and time and that bending is responsible for the effects of gravity - both on objects with mass, and on light.
• Bondi K-Calculus - a method of deriving the effects of Special Relativity, using only basic math.
• Usenet Relativity FAQ
• Jason W. Hinson's Relativty and FTL (Faster than Light) Travel Homepage
• Modern Relativity is a collection of pages on General Relativity. While many of these pages have a fair amount of qualitative description, they also rely on multivariable calculus and differential equations. (undergraduate-graduate level)
• Sean M. Carroll's Lecture Notes on General Relativity derived from a graduate level course and with related links.

  Quantum Mechanics

  If relativity is the physics of the very large, quantum mechanics is the physics of the very small. Quantum mechanics gets its name from the observation that there is not a continuous spectrum of energy levels of such things as electrons surrounding atoms or protons and neutrons within the nucleii of such atoms. Rather, electrons can only change their potential energy in bursts of discrete "quanta" or packets. These jumps correspond to the energy of a photon, a quantum of light, released when the electorn's energy drops or absorbed to make the electron's energy rise. They must be those specific values, no less.

  In the first half of the 20th century, the foundations of quantum mechanics were laid out. These included the discovery that particles can behave like waves and that light, thought to behave more like a wave, can also behave like a particle. In addition quantum mechanics shows that it is impossible to pin down how fast and in what direction a particular particle at a particular location is moving - there must always be a certain level of uncertainty in such a measurement. There is a similar uncertainty in a particle's energy and the time that it has that energy. In addition when ever we try to pin down whether a thing is acting more like a wave or a particle or where exactly it is and where it's moving, the way we go about making our check will change the experiment. Because we're making the observation, that will change the outcome.

• Tom from the Queen Mary University of London presents a series of pages describing the dual wave-particle natures of light and things we usually think of as particles like electrons in this Wave Particle Duality site. The text is mostly concept oriented with a little algebra and has several questions scattered throughout.
• David Harrison of the University of Toronto describes the Stern-Gerlach Experiment which, in 1922 established electron spin polarization. He also describes the use of Stern-Gerlach apparati in correlation experiments
• Richard Feynman (1918-1988)was one of the younger physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project. He is well known for being able to explain physics concepts in an intuitive, personable fashion as typified in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which came from his freshman physics class at CalTech. He is also well known for his personal anecdotes compiled in such books as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, the later of which recounts his famous O-ring demonstration for the Challenger commision. But, he shares the Nobel Prize for reconciling two different models of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) and the position-time diagrams of elementary particle interactions which describe that and other processes, bear his name. Feynman Online -- The Official Feynman Website contains a number of excerpts of his writings as well as links to other sites relating to him.

  Nuclear and Particle Physics

• The ABC's of Nuclear Science
• Matthew L. Wald assesses storage options of radioactive waste such as at Yucca Mountain in his article A New Vision for Nuclear Waste for Technology Review. New! 5/24/07
• Contemporary Physics Education Project produces informative wall charts primarily concerned with particle physics. They include ones describing the Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions, Nuclear Science, Fusion, and Cosmology.
• General Atomics Fusion Group Educational Home Page
• The Particle Data Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Particle Adventure
• The Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC)'s Virtual Visitor Center includes a large section describing particle theory, mostly at a conceptual level, with some algebra. Some familiarity with physics is helpful here, such as knowledge of the concepts of force, momentum and energy. Otherwise, it is appropriate for high school students and above.
• Northwestern University's Radiation Safety Handbook
• Particle Physics UK presents their Picture of the Month along with a description of the item so displayed and its relevance to physics. New! 5/16/07

  GUTs, TOEs, String Theory and M-Brane Theory

  GUTs are Grand Unification Theories - theories which unite the four fundamental forces of Electromagnetism, and the Weak and Strong Nuclear forces. TOEs are Theories of Everything - which unite those three forces with the force of Gravity. If these forces behave as if they are the same force, it appears that they do so only at very high energies, which makes experimental verification of GUTs rather difficult. Currently there is solid experimental evidence verifying Electroweak theories - those which unify Electromagnetism with the Weak nuclear force. Superstring theory, aka string theory, is currently the best candidate for a working GUT & TOE, but the energies that would be required to verify it are cosmologically large, far exceeding that of any accelerator we could build in the forseable future. String theory also incorporates the earlier Supersymmetry theory (SUSY), versions of which continue to evolve independently of string theory.
• Kenneth Koehler presents this Quantum Gravity Concept Map.
• David Wagner presents Introduction to Supersymmetry at the NLC the Next Linear Collider at Colorado University.
• John Pierre's Superstrings! String Theory Home Page
• The Official String Theory Web Site
• Offline
  • Perhaps the best source for the interested layperson on string theory is:
    Greene, Brian The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1999. Reading Level: High School & above.