Specific illustrations are given of questions and problems designed to lead students in introductory physics courses into visualizing and reasoning qualitatively about physical phenomena. Examples include phenomena related to mechanics, electrostatic/magnetic interactions, resistive direct-current circuits, and Thompson's experiments marking the…

An air-track and glider system used to demonstrate Newton's second law is described. Advantages of using the system are included. (SK)

Describes a variation of the familiar laboratory investigation on the spring and mass oscillator. (SK)

Explains that the efficiency and the useful power available from a windmill turbine, of a laminar-flow model, will vary due to rotational kinetic energy of the downwind stream and turbulent mixing from outside the boundaries of the idealized stream. (GA)

Describes a simple demonstration that shows the change in molecular density and the reduction in pressure of air in a centrifugal field. Uses two circular disks with the same radius and rotating with the same angular velocity, in loose mutual contact, around their symmetry axis. (GA)

Presents the supernova explosion in a binary system as an application of classical mechanics. This presentation is intended to illustrate the power of the equivalent one-body problem and provide undergraduate students with a variety of insights into elementary classical mechanics. (HM)

Discusses how the adiabatic law for ideal gases can be derived from the assumption of a Maxwell-Boltzmann (or any other) distribution of velocities--in contrast to the usual derivations from thermodynamics alone, and the higher-order effect that leads to one-body viscosity. An elementary derivation of the adiabatic law is given. (Author/DS)

Discusses the construction of an operator formulation of classical mechanics which is directly concerned with wave packets in configuration space and is more similar to that of convential quantum theory than other extant operator formulations of classical mechanics. (Author/HM)

Shows how through proper handling of the nonuniform motion of semiclassical coordinates spurious excitation terms are eliminated. An application to the problem of nuclear Coulomb excitation is presented as an example. (HM)

Discussed is the automobile in terms of the Otto cycle, engine heat losses, internal engine losses, drive train losses, road power, and driving habits. Each of these topics is described and calculations are shown to aid the physics teacher in the use of the automobile in the physics classroom. (Author/DS)

Centrifugal Force is described and defined in terms of the underlying theory and terminology with the aid of rigorous analysis of this phenomenon. (DS)

Described is the phasor method of superposition of waves. The intensity pattern from a system of microwave sources is calculated point by point on a plane corresponding to a film emulsion, and then printed and directly converted to a hologram for 3-cm microwaves. Calculations, construction, and viewing of holograms are included. (Author/DS)

By using the method of moments, it is shown that several important and apparently unrelated theorems describing average properties of stochastic systems are in fact particular cases of a general law; this method is applied to generalize the virial theorem and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to the time-dependent case. (Author/SK)

Discusses several different methods that performers (divers and trampolinists) use to initate somersaults and twists and presents concrete examples of each method. Presents and evaluates quantitative calculations using information about the moments of inertia, mass, etc., of "typical" performers. (Author/GA)

Presented is a new proof of the uncertainty relation for wave functions that are absolutely integrable and have absolutely integrable Fourier transforms. (Author/GA)