Motivated by quaint woodcut depictions often found in many late 16th and 17th century ballistic manuals of cannonballs fired in air, a comparison of their shapes with those calculated for the classic case of a projectile moving in a linear resisting medium is made. In considering the asymmetrical nature of such trajectories, the initial launch…

The theoretical and experimental solutions for vibrations of a vertical-oriented, prismatic, thin cantilever beam are studied. The beam orientation is "downwards", i.e. the clamped end is above the free end, and it is subjected to a transverse movement at a selected frequency. Both the behaviour of the device driver and the beam's weak-damping…

It is a widespread misunderstanding in introductory physics courses that the motion of rolling bodies in general can be calculated using the point of contact as a reference point when equating the rate of change of angular momentum to the torque. In this paper I discuss in general two correct rules to be used instead, in order to derive the…

The Dirac belt trick is often employed in physics classrooms to show that a 2n rotation is not topologically equivalent to the absence of rotation whereas a 4n rotation is, mirroring a key property of quaternions and their isomorphic cousins, spinors. The belt trick can leave the student wondering if a real understanding of quaternions and spinors…

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…