Selected examples from the Physics Resource Packets Project

Introductory Mechanics
  • Ball thrown vertically
 ballup Simple situation, suitable for class discussion or homework
  • Body falls with air resistance
 airresist Baseball dropped from airplane to be caught as a publicity stunt around 1915, but Casey Stengel arranges for a grapefruit to be dropped instead!
Introductory Electricity/Magnetism
  • Deflection of an ink drop in an ink-jet printer
 inkdrop Motion of charged ink drop between charged parallel plates. Offers practice using Maple commands, and fairly realistic ink-jet parameters.
  • Calculate potential difference between two points, given the electric field.
 lineint Uses vectors to carry out the line integral of electric field. Does two equivalent paths and gets same result for both.
  • Prevent invading protons from penetrating Starship Enterprise
 wall A 1-m length of Starship Enterprise must be made safe from invading protons whose KE is 20,000 eV. You have a total charge which can be subdivided and positioned to accomplish this task.
  • Create the effect of a solenoid by adding together several current loops.
 loops Calculate and plot axial magnetic fields of several current loops.
  • Create a moving magnetic field
pulse By successively energizing adjacent coaxial coils in an array of coils, the axial magnetic field will move along the coil axis. (animation)
Introductory Waves
  • animation of traveling and standing waves
 stantrav This can be followed by animation of a pulse of some shape traveling to the right or left.
  • track a radio source
 traksrc Calculate distances from source to linear detector array elements. Then add detector magnitudes and phases.
  • resolve two radio sources
 resolve Imcrease the number of detectors in a linear array until two radio sources are resolved.
Introductory Modern Physics
  • Plot the intensity distribution of a light bulb
 lghtbulb Evaluate and plot the Planck distribution
  • Plot the behavior of a wave packet and
    a barrier
 barrier
Classical Mechanics
  • Heavy mass suspended by a light cord.Yank on lower cord to break the lower cord before the upper cord breaks.
 yank Model the cords as springs and let the pull occur at constant speed. Solve the DE for motion of the mass and thus for extensions of the springs. (Advanced version is yankadv).
  • Model the rotation of a rigid body
 euler Use rotation matrices to illustrate movement of a rigid body when the euler angles change. (Obtain animation of body movement.)
  • Mass m on a frictionless tabletop connected via a cord and hole in the center of the table to hanging mass M.
 table Use lagrange's equations to solve and plot this behavior.
Electromagnetic Theory
  • Find the current density as a function of distance from the axis in a wire carrying current at high frequency.
 wireskin Integrate coupled differential equations from wire axis to wire radius to display the solution at various frequencies.
  • Find the charge density along a thin wire.
 cylinder Use a number of thin cylindrical hollow shells of constant charge density to model charge on wire surface, then solve N eqns in N unknowns.
  • Create a moving magnetic field
pulse By successively energizing adjacent coaxial coils in an array of coils, the axial magnetic field will move along the coil axis. (animation)
Quantum Mechanics
  • Search for energies in a parabolic well
 levelpar Search engine for locating energy levels
  • Animate particle moving between
    two potential minima
 slosh Combine the even and odd solutions and display the time dependence via animation.
Thermodynamics/Statistical Mechanics
  • Plot isotherms of van der Waals fluid
 vander
  • Find the point of maximum entropy
    between two groups of oscillators
 match For two groups of distinguishable harmonic oscillators, vary the number n of energy units assigned to one group, with a fixed number N of total energy units. Locate the maximum in entropy, and match to the Einstein model of a solid.