Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of…

Video motion analysis allows tracing trajectories of objects in motion and is an established method in physics education. Tablet computers, with their integrated cameras, offer the opportunity to both record and analyze dynamic motions during experiments on a single device. This enables students to work without transitioning the data between…

A magnetic linear accelerator (or Gauss accelerator) is a device that uses the conversion of magnetic energy into kinetic energy to launch an object with high velocity. A simple experimental implementation consists of a line of steel spheres in which the first one is a permanent magnetic sphere. If another steel ball collides with the magnetic…

The importance of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) in today's research and industry leads to the question of how to include such a key technology in physics education. Manfred Euler has developed an acoustic model experiment to illustrate the fundamental measuring principles based on an analogy between quantum mechanics and acoustics. Based on…

A variety of experiments with smartphones and tablet PCs allow a precise analysis of acoustic phenomena. For example, we recently described an experiment in which a noise signal simultaneously triggered harmonic acoustic resonances in the air column of a tube open at both ends and a tube closed at one end. The measured resonant frequencies were…

This paper continues the collection of experiments that describe the use of cell phones as experimental tools in physics classroom education. We describe a computer-aided determination of the free-fall acceleration "g" using the acoustical Doppler effect. The Doppler shift is a function of the speed of the source. Since a free-falling objects…