PY408 Demos
PY408 Demos - Spring 1999
BU Physics demo room home page
Course schedule:
- TR 11:00 am in SCI B58 - Simmons
Day 1 - 1-12-99
Newton's Laws, inertial frames
Day 2 - 1-14-99
Restoring torque; Conservation of momentum
- Balancing bird 1J20.46
- Two blocks of wood floating in water, to show the restoring torque when it pitches or rolls.
- CO2 rocket 1N22.33
Day 3 - 1-19-99
Gravitation
- a flat metal hoop and a ball bearing
Day 4 - 1-21-99
Simple oscillations
Day 5 - 1-26-99
Forced and damped oscillations
- pendulum dangling from center of a bar; hold the bar horizontally and
drive it back/forth at different frequencies to show resonance
Day 6 - 1-28-99
Brachistochrone problem
Day 7 - 2-2-99
Lagrangian mechanics
- Centrifuge demo - plastic tube, with cars, mounted on a turntable
Day 8 - 2-4-99
Lagrangian mechanics
- Falling ladder - acceleration-faster-than-g apparatus
- Spherical pendulum - simple pendulum mounted far from the support post
Day 9 - 2-9-99
- Oscillating mass on a ramp, all on a skateboard
Day 10 - 2-11-99
Non-holonomic constraints
- Hula hoop with piece of colored tape at one point
- Ice sliding off large clear hemisphere
Day 11 - 2-18-99
Symmetry
- Different colored tippy tops (2)
- Hoop to roll down inclined plane
- Earth + moon set-up from Astro
Day 12 - 2-23-99
Gravitation
- Earth + moon set-up from Astro
- Conic sections - wooden samples showing different ways to cut a cone to get different orbits
Day 16 - 3-16-99
Rotating reference frames
- styrofoam and tinkertoy sticks to illustrate Euler angles
- rotating platform
Day 17 - 3-18-99
Rotating reference frames
- rotating platform
- several cardboard blocks (childrens blocks from home) and a ball for identifying spherical, symmetric and asymmetric tops
Day 18 - 3-23-99
Rotational stability