CC-licensed physics artwork

 I'm putting my collection of physics drawings that I've been constructing for the past few years online here for physics teachers to download and use in their classes.  There's not a lot to the collection, yet, but I hope it continues to grow.

The files were constructed in OpenOffice Draw. I don't know what programs can be used to open these files, other than OpenOffice Draw and its relatives.

I'm (obviously) not a graphic designer. I'm not claiming these are great pieces of artwork, but I am putting them online and using a Creative Commons license for use.  I hope that some of you out there who see these drawing will find them to be useful and that maybe some of you would be interested in helping to build the collection and improve the images.

Physics Drawings - Mechanics

Physics Drawings - Thermodynamics

Physics Drawings - Electrostatics 1

Physics Drawings - Electrostatics 2

Physics Drawings - DC circuits

Physics Drawings - Racetrack



This work by Andrew Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mythbusters need to spin more science

I want to like this segment that the Mythbusters did on the merry-go-round spun by the bullet.  I think it's an interesting question based off of a scene from a movie: Is there enough kinetic energy in a bullet to spin a merry-go-round.

A proper analysis of the question could involve kinetic energy, rotational kinetic energy, torque, angular speed, angular acceleration, angular momentum, friction, air resistance and potentially other factors.

The Mythbusters only vaguely waved their hands at some of these ideas and presented physical parameters in weird units.

The voice over in the above video said "First, the science of spin..." then proceeded to say very little about rotational motion.

Grant talks about how the bullet has to "overcome inertia".  Okay....I mean, we tell physics students that in rotational motion it is the moment of inertia that matters, but I'm willing to let it slide. EXCEPT, he then pulls out a force gauge and measures how much force is needed to just get the merry-go-round to move. But, since we care about the rotation of the merry-go-round, it's the torque that matters.  Plus, what he really is getting at is a measure of the coefficient of static (rotational) friction on the axle.

There were a lot of other problems with the things the Mythbusters said in the segment.  Some of what they said was just using colloquial terms for physical properties which a physicists would not use.  I'm not so terribly upset by those comments.  I'm just bothered by the lack of coherent explanation of the physics of the system.  I came up with a simple analysis of the experiment, using parameters provided in the video and considering just conservation of momentum. I don't claim it to be a full treatment of the question, just more of a back of the envelope type calculation.  (And I don't take friction into account, either.)

I turned my calculation into a pencast:


Analysis of Mythbusters merry-go-round question

Links from my ISAAPT talk

I gave a talk last weekend at the Illinois Section AAPT Spring 2011 meeting called "What Physics Teaching Blogs Are You Reading?"  (You'll have to scroll to the bottom of that page to see the abstract.)
     I'm putting the presentation online here, in case anyone wants to check it out.  What I said in my talk was that maybe I should have titled it "What Physics Teaching Blogs Am I Reading?" since it is a subset of some of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.  The presentation has for each blog I chose: the name of the blog, the URL, a partial description of the blogger or the blog (copied from the blog itself) and a couple of particularly interesting posts that I picked out.  That's all there was to the presentation.

My ISAAPT Spring 2011 presentation


If all you want are the links to the blogs, I put them together in one convenient bundle here:


All the physics teaching blogs I'm currently reading.