Monthly Archives: October 2013

Momentum and an asteroid hitting the Earth

This past week we started to study momentum, and how to give an object momentum by exerting a force over a period of time, or an impulse. One demonstration the students enjoyed was throwing eggs at a sheet.  Here we can see the students throwing an egg at a sheet, yet it is not breaking!  […]

Newton’s 3rd Law and Vectors

Last week we finished our studies of Newton’s Laws and started to explore motion in two dimensions. In order to explore the ideas of Action-Reaction we had robots perform a tug-of-war.  The question is, when is the tension greater.  When a robot pulls on a rope tied to the wall, or when two robots pull […]

So you want to learn about the Higgs Particle

Today we started class by discussing the Higgs Boson, which is particularly relevant since we are talking about Newton’s Second Law.  Perhaps someday, we will call it Newton’s Model of Dynamics instead of Newton’s Law. The American Association of Physics Teachers came out with a resource guide of articles on the Higgs Boson. This is […]

Blossoms and I went back to school this weekend

As teachers we often engage in professional development.  As my son Leonardo often asks, why do I need to go back to school.  What grade am I in?  Grade 100? I went down to Cambridge to a program run by Blossoms.  Blossoms is trying to integrate video into the classroom.  Not in that 1980s way […]

Who will win the Nobel?

The students just finished writing lab reports on Galileo and inertia.  They worked hard this weekend exploring the ideas of why do all objects in free fall accelerate uniformly towards the Earth no matter what the mass.  The short explanation is that as weight, or the force of gravity of an object increases, the inertia […]

I am a best-selling author in less than a week!

I am sure it won’t last.  But in some obscure category on Amazon, I am #1 on their selling list. And granted, my overall sales rank is down below 14,000, I am doing pretty well in a few categories.    

The Romans were experts in Nanotechnology!

Great article last week on Phys.org about the Lycurgus Cup.  This is a personal story that reminds me of my wife’s wedding ring. The Romans knew to spike the glass with a few hundred parts million of silver and gold in order to create a dichronic effect. “The goblet was created approximately 1,600 years ago, […]