Today's students are increasingly immersed in a landscape of screens and handheld digital devices through which a good deal of their interactions with the world around them are mediated. Physics educators, meanwhile, continue to rely on traditional human interactions with the physical world, such as sliding down a ramp or throwing a baseball, in…

An attempt to calibrate a conventional oven led to making a measurement of a thermophysical property of water using items found in the author's home. Specifically, the ratio of the energy required to heat water from the melting point to boiling to the energy required to completely boil away the water is found to be 5.7. This may be compared to the…

Quadcopters (also known as "drones") do not fly in vacuum. This is obvious enough that experimenting on one in a vacuum chamber would seem rather uninteresting, but there is one question that may be usefully addressed by such an experiment: the mechanism for yaw control. Quadcopters control yaw (rotation about the vertical axis) by…

This paper provides a brief introduction to antimatter and how it, along with other modern physics topics, is utilized in positron emission tomography (PET) scans. It further describes a hands-on activity for students to help them gain an understanding of how PET scans assist in detecting cancer. Modern physics topics provide an exciting way to…

There are already several articles describing ways to teach physics using smartphone apps, but what are some experiments you can perform immediately without downloading any additional software? In the spirit of increasing the amount of hands-on activities each of us is doing, and to give us backup activities when you have a few extra minutes of…

Young's experiment is hailed as a milestone in ushering a new understanding of the wave nature of light and is even taught at the high school level. Unfortunately, even the most cursory presentation of the subject of diffraction becomes confusing. The theory and equations based on Fresnel's work appear arcane and incomprehensible to a high school…

For more than 10 years, I had taught Kepler's laws and the law of universal gravity without a corresponding experiment. I sometimes remember how these topics were difficult for me in my high school days to understand. At that time, I thought that one of the reasons for my difficulty was that these phenomena cannot be visualized using physical…

Undergraduate lab design balances several factors: 1) simple experiments connected with learning objectives, 2) experiments sufficiently accurate for comparisons between theory and measurements without gaps when students ascribe discrepancies to confounding factors (imperfect simplifying assumptions, measurement uncertainties, and "human…

The introductory physics classroom has long educated students about the properties of the atom and the nucleus. But absent from these lessons has been an informed discussion of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its parent science nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Physics teachers should not miss the opportunity to instruct upon this highly…

Most springs do not simply obey Hooke's law because they are constructed to have an initial tension, which must be overcome before normal elongation occurs. This property, well known to engineers, is universally neglected in elementary physics courses. In particular, the standard simple harmonic motion experiment omits any discussion of this…

Analysis of collisions is standardly included in the introductory physics course. In one dimension (1D), there do not seem to be any unusual issues: Typically, the initial velocities of the two colliding objects are specified, and the problem is to find the final velocities. In 1D there are therefore two unknown variables. One can write the…

This study aims to measure Brewster's angle of glass and acrylic brick with an easy-to-obtain mobile application (app) by changing the tungsten light source to a red laser. The popularization of the smartphone has inspired many to use its various built-in sensors to carry out general physics experiments. Many others have adopted both a laser and a…

New learning strategies try to extend the use of common devices among students in physics lab practices. In particular, there is a recent trend to explore the possibilities of using smartphone sensors to describe physics phenomena. On the other hand, the study of the moment of inertia by the use of the torsion pendulum is a typical example in the…

Gay-Lussac's law states that the pressure of an ideal gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature if the volume is constant. Students observe this relationship by taking measurements on the pressure of gas in a flask or metal sphere at different temperatures and then extrapolate the data to estimate absolute zero. In our college…

Even though many physics teachers take their students on a calculation adventure through circular motion and Newton's universal law of gravity to determine Earth's velocity, most of us leave it at that. We present the final result and say, "Look, Earth is moving around the Sun at about 107,000 km/hr (66,000 mph), yet we can't feel the motion…