This paper shows how a freely downloadable and powerful software package, "SMath Studio," can be used to model physical systems in physics teaching. The software can form the basis of lecture demonstrations by teachers or can be used individually by students working in an educational environment or on their own home computers.

This paper has two parts. In the first part, intended for physics students as well as for engineering students whose primary interest is not physics, a new lesson related to shadow properties is given as a part of lectures on light. The effects resulting from a shadow 'motion' observed on a screen were looked into. The relationship between the…

This paper presents an experiment in which students determine the mass sensitivity of three crystal quartz resonators, designed to be carried out in "Physics Laboratory II" at the Institute of Experimental Physics, University of Wroclaw. The authors discuss the process of setting up the experiment and the results of the measurements.…

Many textbooks dealing with general relativity do not demonstrate the derivation of forces in enough detail. The analyses presented herein demonstrate straightforward methods for computing forces by way of general relativity. Covariant divergence of the stress-energy-momentum tensor is used to derive a general expression of the force experienced…

When asked to explain the Galilean non-invariance of classical electromagnetism on the basis of pre-relativistic considerations alone, students--and sometimes their teachers too--may face an impasse. Indeed, they often argue that a pre-relativistic physicist could most obviously have provided the explanation "at a glance", on the basis of the…

The collision model is frequently introduced to describe electronic conductivity in solids. Depending on the chosen approach, the introduction of the collision time can lead to erroneous results for the average velocity of the electrons, which enters the expression for the electrical conductivity. In other textbooks, correct results are obtained…

In continuation of a previous work, we present an analytic study of ascending vertical motion of a rocket subjected to a quadratic drag for the case where the mass-variation law is a linear function of time. We discuss the detailed analytical solution of the model differential equations in closed form. Examples of application are presented and…

Based on relativistic velocity addition and the conservation of momentum and energy, I present simple derivations of the expressions for the relativistic momentum and kinetic energy of a particle, and for the formula E = mc[superscript 2]. (Contains 5 footnotes and 2 figures.)

The laboratory (lab) frame angular distribution derived in two-body scattering theory exhibits a singularity at the maximum lab scattering angle. The singularity appears in the kinematic factor that transforms the centre of momentum (cm) angular distribution to the lab angular distribution. We show that it is caused in the transformation by the…

The null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the constancy of the one-way speed of light in the "rest system" are used to formulate a simple problem, to be solved by elementary geometry techniques using a pair of compasses and non-graduated rulers. The solution consists of a drawing allowing a direct visualization of all the fundamental…

Any free-particle wavepacket solution of Schrodinger's equation can be converted by differentiations to wavepackets rotating about the original direction of motion. The angular momentum component along the motion associated with this rotation is an integral multiple of [h-bar]. It is an "intrinsic" angular momentum: independent of origin and…

We apply several physical ideas to determine the steady temperature distribution in a medium moving with uniform velocity between two infinite parallel plates. We compute it in the coordinate frame moving with the medium by integration over the "past" to account for the influence of an infinite set of instantaneous point sources of heat in past…

We study the turning point problem of a spherical pendulum. The special cases of the simple pendulum and the conical pendulum are noted. For simple initial conditions the solution to this problem involves the golden ratio, also called the golden section, or the golden number. This number often appears in mathematics where you least expect it. To…

An apparently unnoticed analogy between the torque-free motion of a rotating rigid body about a fixed point and the propagation of light in anisotropic media is stated. First, a new plane construction for visualizing this torque-free motion is proposed. This method uses an intrinsic representation alternative to angular momentum and independent of…

The motion of two bodies, along a straight line, under the inverse square law of gravity is considered in detail, progressing from simpler cases to more complex ones: (1) one body fixed and one free; (2) both bodies free and identical mass; (3) both bodies free and different masses; and (4) the inclusion of electrostatic forces for both bodies'…