Barriers to women's education and employment in Europe and the United States in the 19th century made it unlikely that any women would be among the few physicists whose ideas are taught in high school and college courses. This paper explores the social settings in which three influential physicists worked--James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Millikan, and…

The underrepresentation of women and people of color in physics has been attributed to a wide variety of factors ranging from society-wide conditions such as income inequality and sparse role models, to daily interpersonal interactions that disadvantage or discourage women and people of color from pursuing physics. These factors may be seen as…

As we saw last month, over 40% of the students who recently earned bachelor's degrees in physics enter the job market. There are employment opportunities for these graduates in all areas of the economy. When we contact graduates, we ask them where they are working, and we use their responses to compile a list of employers in each state who have…

By describing the motion of a charged particle in the well-known nonuniform field of a current-carrying long straight wire, a variety of teaching/learning opportunities are described: 1) Brief review of a standard problem; 2) Vector analysis; 3) Dimensionless variables; 4) Coupled differential equations; 5) Numerical solutions.

With one glance at the starting salaries of new bachelor's degree recipients in Fig. 1, a teacher or parent can see the career fields to which their high school students interested in the best economic opportunities might aspire: several engineering fields (chemical, electrical, mechanical), computer science, physics, and mathematics.

Video analysis of motion has been in use now for some time. However, some teachers may not have video equipment or may be looking for innovative ways to engage students with interesting applications at no cost. The recent advent of YouTube offers opportunities for students to measure kinematic properties of real-life events using their computers.…

High school physics students are often capable of, and commonly interested in, understanding natural phenomena beyond those described in their textbooks. In order to supplement the shortage of topics covered in their physics courses, many students turn to popular scientific books, journals, and other media. There, they discover a plethora of…

In the last several decades the image of the leaky pipeline has become commonplace as a metaphor for the loss of women and minorities to the physics enterprise at every stage, from high school to the most advanced positions in academia. At the 2007 Winter AAPT meeting in Seattle, however, the AAPT Committee on Women in Physics sponsored a session…

Discusses the current shortage of qualified physics teachers and possible reasons for this shortage. (BT)