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.
I’ve recently been conversing with a couple of students that I had during the Covid year. Both are in engineering at The Ohio State University. I had both when they were juniors in Physics, and again, as seniors in AP Physics 2. Since I knew them prior to the Covid year, I didn’t need to introduce myself. For students with whom I was not acquainted, it seemed important to produce a video that gave them some sense of Physics and how I approached the course.
Both videos were produced a couple of weeks before school started. I had time, but not much of an idea how to edit videos.
For the Physics students, I wanted to get across the fun and wonder of Physics. In an online course, it’s hard to communicate the twin virtues of fun and dangerous. For the intro video, I tried to get across the fun, my unconventional nature and that diligent effort would be expected.
For AP students, the purpose of the introduction was different. AP Physics 2 students are smart and they’ve had a year of physics. They know the score. It’s important that they believe that even if I’m not smarter than them, at least I know physics better than they do.
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