As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional development programs have been canceled or postponed. Many teachers are working from home, at least in part, limiting how frequently they can interact with colleagues and interrupting the ease of popping in on the teacher next door. Because these common resources are out of reach, teachers…

In this paper, a very simple and low-cost setup design is described for the Seebeck coefficient measurement of the disc and rod-shaped specimens. The setup has been tested for its reliable working by measuring the Seebeck coefficients of standard samples; measured values match with the literature. The setup can be built with commonly available raw…

At the end of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign during World War 1, Lance Corporal William Scurry saved thousands of lives with his one simple invention. As the ANZAC soldiers prepared to withdraw from the disastrous 9-monthlong Gallipoli campaign, Scurry came up with the idea of setting up a large battery of rifles that would discharge automatically…

A novel demonstration device for realizing the intuitive visual observation of the system's internal energy change is proposed. The device is safe, simple, and efficient, combining an infrared camera with a water bottle sprayer. With this setup, the changes of thermal images for air and helium during the compression and expansion processes were…

Students are well aware that when an electric current flows through a light bulb, it glows. As their grade increases, they have understood that electric current flows because electric charges move. Since the transfer of electric charges is not visible, students have many cognitive difficulties in understanding this process, and teaching materials…

As intriguing optical phenomena that occur in nature, mirages are widely known and often mentioned in physics classes when introducing the basics of optics. In the atmosphere, a mirage occurs under the condition of vertical variations in air density, which are usually caused by a temperature gradient. The light rays are continuously refracted and…

Experimental results are presented concerning a bead sliding on a rotating, horizontal rod. If the rod rotates at constant angular velocity then the sliding speed in the radial direction increases exponentially with time, provided that the rotation speed is sufficient to overcome friction. Otherwise the bead rotates in a circular path of constant…

An electric motor converts electrical energy into mechanical work and an electric generator converts mechanical work into electrical energy. The symmetry between the motor and generator naturally leads to questions about creating a perpetual motion machine. The allure of this question has inspired textbook problems, physics education articles, and…

The theory of the Big Bang is accepted nearly universally among the scientific community. However, there is a small cadre of individuals who dispute this consensus and they point to a handful of datums that don't fit into the picture. One such datum is the existence of a star with an age reported to be older than the cosmos itself. This star is…

Issues associated with nature of science (NOS) have long been recognized as an essential component of scientific literacy. While consensus exists regarding the importance of an explicit reflective approach, precisely how to teach NOS remains elusive. The present study explores one particularly promising approach, namely the use of historical…

Under most conditions, a liquid mixture does not have long-range structural order and may be considered to be a homogeneous collection of molecules in random motion. However, if a single-phase critical mixture of a partially miscible liquid--liquid system is subjected to a small temperature jump into the two-phase region, then structural coherence…

Water electrolysis is used to teach important and fundamental concepts in chemistry. In practical water electrolysis experiments, it is difficult to achieve the ideal 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to oxygen. This work demonstrates an experimental setup comprising multiple water electrolysis cells connected in series to simultaneously visualize the effects…

As simple and ubiquitous redox-active organic molecules, quinones participate in diverse electron transfer processes in chemistry and biological systems for energy transformation and signal transduction. We introduce here a practical exercise to study the redox potentials of benzoquinone and its two derivatives by combining the electrochemistry…

About 30 years ago I taught a series of summer enrichment programs for high school physics teachers, using funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes. I deliberately chose teachers from smaller cities and towns who were unlikely to have contact with other physics teachers. One of my more interesting teachers came from a rural area in a far…

This paper starts with an introduction to the concept of momentum current. It is followed by a discussion of its strength and density with the aid of several analogies made between momentum current and electric current. Based on the novel concepts of thermal charge and its quantity (entropy), the analogies are extended to entropy current. The…