This new book aims to guide both the experimentalist and theoretician through their compulsory laboratory courses forming part of an undergraduate physics degree. The rationale behind this book is to show students and interested readers the value and beauty within a carefully planned and executed experiment, and to help them to develop the skills to carry out experiments themselves.
A physics course for 9th to 11th grade covering essential physics concepts. Introductory Physics is a mastery-oriented text specially designed to foster content mastery and retention when used with the companion resource materials available on CD from Centripetal Press. Another key feature of Centripetal Press texts is the integration of related subjects: history, mathematics, language skills, epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) as well as frequent references from the humanities. Fresh pedagogical ideas and presentation make this text a superior choice for all learning environments where rigor and lucidity are desired in a text.
ASPC is designed for honors-level or accelerated high school freshmen. It is a physical science text that trims away the fat and goes deep so that students get a solid preparatory foundation in these two subjects. Centripetal Press advocates a "physics first" approach to the high school science sequence. In short, having a light physics-based course in 9th grade creates the possibility of carry-over into later science course in a way that the standard "biology first" sequence does not. Energy, work, heat transfer, the atomic model, the periodic table, substances, atomic bonding, and other subjects require only Algebra I mathematics. (Freshmen using ASPC should have already completed Algebra I in the 8th grade.) In addition to these subjects, important skills in the laboratory, plus unit conversions, scientific notation, metric prefixes, and the writing of lab reports are essential skills that students will thoroughly learn in this text. Imagine going on to accelerated 10th grade chemistry with all of these skills and concepts firmly in hand! The chemistry class can cover more ground when they do not need to cover those essentials. And the practice of building upon skills already learned supports the "mastery learning" paradigm employed in every Centripetal Press textbook.
This book on the use of Arduino and Smartphones in physics experiments, with a focus on mechanics, introduces various techniques by way of examples. The main aim is to teach students how to take meaningful measurements and how to interpret them. Each topic is introduced by an experiment. Those at the beginning of the book are rather simple to build and analyze. As the lessons proceed, the experiments become more refined and new techniques are introduced. Rather than providing recipes to be adopted while taking measurements, the need for new concepts is raised by observing the results of an experiment. A formal justification is given only after a concept has been introduced experimentally. The discussion extends beyond the taking of measurements to their meaning in terms of physics, the importance of what is learned from the laws that are derived, and their limits. Stress is placed on the importance of careful design of experiments as to reduce systematic errors and on good practices to avoid common mistakes. Data are always analyzed using computer software. C-like structures are introduced in teaching how to program Arduino, while data collection and analysis is done using Python. Several methods of graphical representation of data are used.
Comprehensive lab procedures for introductory physics Experiments in Physics is a lab manual for an introductory calculus-based physics class. This collection of 32 experiments includes laboratory procedures in the areas of mechanics, heat, electricity, magnetism, optics, and modern physics, with post-lab questions designed to help students analyze their results more deeply. Introductory material includes guidance on error analysis, significant figures, graphical analysis and more, providing students with a convenient reference throughout the duration of the course.
A laboratory manual for high schools, colleges, and universities, this book contains more than 80 experiments and lecture demonstrations. The coverage includes the essentials of general physics: mechanics and molecular physics, electricity and magnetism, optics and atomic physics, and condensed matter physics. All the experiments are illustrated through the results of real measurements and include many novel experiments developed by the author.
This book presents experiments which will teach physics relevant to astronomy. The astronomer, as instructor, frequently faces this need when his college or university has no astronomy department and any astronomy course is taught in the physics department. The physicist, as instructor, will find this intellectually appealing when faced with teaching an introductory astronomy course. From these experiments, the student will acquire important analytical tools, learn physics appropriate to astronomy, and experience instrument calibration and the direct gathering and analysis of data. Experiments that can be performed in one laboratory session as well as semester-long observation projects are included.
