These are my students on our field trip to Cedar Point for Physics Day in 2011. They are all weird in their own way. I picked the year at random, because it doesn’t matter.
Bill Gates makes a good point about students being over diagnosed, labeled and medicated.
While working out, my brother and I were chatting about goals for 2025. These aren’t New Year’s resolutions that are vague and optimistic, but actionable tasks that are specific, measurable and recorded. It’s the difference between “start working out” and “go to the gym twice per week”
I’ve been scanning and organizing old photos.
This is from Physics Day at Cedar Point in 2001. Johnny is the student in the center of the bottom row.
The 20th Century was the Century of Physics. In 1905, Einstein published his “Special Theory of Relativity”, and up to about World War 2, modern physics was established. Very little of modern physics corresponds with what we experience in daily life, but it’s been experimentally verified and is used in current technology.
Physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and others debated the new theories, and tried to make some sense of the universe.
Youtube presented me with this video explaining that physicists have only 5 jokes. Angela Collier’s Youtube page says that she is a physicist and I could see that she is cute, so right up my alley.
Dark matter detector doesn’t find dark matter.
In a cavern, mile below the surface of South Dakota, is the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector. They haven’t detected any dark matter
At East Harbor State Park, we tried a chimney log fire.
Three hollow logs were stacked to make the chimney. I had cut a hole in the bottom log so we could start and feed the fire. Once it got going, firewood was dropped in the top. The fire got hotter and bigger pretty quick. It lasted for about an hour before it collapsed.
Here’s a creepy one for Halloween.
When Danish Physicist, Niels Bohr, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, Carlsberg gave Bohr a house with a beer tap directly from the brewery. That’s the kind of national pride I like.
Physicist Richard Feynman is a hero/celebrity in the world of physics. There are many great and interesting physicists, but Feynman had a clarity of thought and range of interests that makes any time spent learning about him is worthwhile. He makes you a better person.
During the Covid year, the first quarter was going to be remote. and that was about all we knew. Teaching remotely, I couldn’t give students the a quality show, so I thought that I’d produce lecture videos that are good in a different way. The intent was to renovate the curriculum while producing videos that would be a resource for my remaining three or four years.
By the end of the year, NoRo management decided that I was done teaching Physics, so the videos were never edited to perfection or to be seen by anyone ever again. I decided that I’d post them here. These are the lecture videos. There were homework explanation videos, practice problem videos and quiz videos. I may post those in subsequent years.
Since this is about the time when the Chapter 2 test would be coming up, these are the “Kinematics in One Dimension” presentations.
This is our first lecture on actual physics.
Then we get to velocity.
Acceleration, and we are done. Usually, students get killed on this chapter test.
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