Big Links Pages

Really just an excuse for me to post a favorite shot from Brooks Falls, Katmai, Alaska a few years ago. Arctic Lynx.

In any case, I always found some utility in big pages of links for video series. Links to videos (where possible) and question sets. So I made some for video series in various content areas. Here's what I've got.

The Mechanical Universe [52 college episodes and 28 high school adaptations]

Conceptual Physics Alive! [34 Paul Hewitt lectures]

Cosmos

A Personal Voyage [Carl Sagan 1980: 13 episodes]

A Spacetime Odyssey [Neil deGrasse Tyson 2014: 13 episodes]

Possible Worlds [Neil deGrasse Tyson 2020: 13 episodes]

Chemistry

Chemistry: A Volatile History [Jim Al-Khalili: 3 episodes]

Hunting the Elements ... Beyond the Elements [David Pogue]

Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions [13 episodes]

The World of Chemistry [Roald Hoffmann: 26 episodes]

Earth Science and Environmental Science

How Earth Made Us | How the Earth Changed History [Iain Stewart: 5 episodes]

Earth Revealed: Introductory Geology [26 episodes]

The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science [13 episodes]

I'll keep these lynx links over in the bar on the right.

A Bundle of Phyz: MIRRORS AND LENSES

Much can be made of spherical mirrors and thin lenses in the geometric optics curriculum. Here are a few.

Is the image upright or inverted? Enlarged or reduced? In "Image Characterization," students are tasked with such determinations.

In "Mirror Experience," students gaze upon their reflections in a hand-held spherical mirror at various distances and characterize their own images.

"Ray Tracing 1 and 2" are exercises in drawing principal rays to construct images in spherical mirrors.

Laser Viewing Tank

As laser pointers became available to physics teachers, we took to puffing clouds of chalk dust, fog-in-a-can, or other particulate scattering agents into our classrooms to demonstrate the the magic of light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.

One year, I initiated a school-wide fire alarm during such a demonstration. The previous summer, the custodians had been tasked with cranking up smoke detector sensitivity to 11, unbeknownst to me.

Another thing we began doing was to shine our laser beams into water-filled fish tanks. The beams were again more visible when a scattering agent was deployed. Some used milk, some likes Pine-Sol. I used contact lens cleaning solution before settling on Mop-N-Glo.

But fish tanks were heavy, and the gallons and gallons of water made them downright unwieldy. It was a teacher-only demonstration activity. 

As nice as it is for students to remember Physics as the class where the teacher did cool things, I wanted them to remember it was the class where they did cool things.

Paul Hewitt's Next Time Questions

Next-Time Questions are favorite insightful questions I have asked my students over my teaching career. I have embellished them with cartoons to catch interest. Their intention is to elicit student thinking. My use of them was posting several in a glass case outside my lecture hall—without answers. The wait-time for answers was one week. I could have called them Next-Week Questions, which would have been more appropriate.

Most of these have been published over the years as Figuring Physics in The Physics Teacher magazine. They have also been in ancillaries to my Conceptual Physics textbooks, and physical science textbooks as well. My hope is that teachers will pose the questions, and withhold answers to “next time,” which could be as early as the next class meeting. Their educational value is the long wait time!