Student projects

Chladni plate picture

Sand pattern on a Chladni plate with a rubber grommet used to mount the CD. When we use the grommet the rings occur at every frequency, not just the expected discrete ones.

Safety first

Students working on my laser (measuring the beam size)

Magnetic force does no work

I was at an MNSTA conference in the spring when I sat in on a workshop showing off a few different labs students could do (run by Steve Ethan of physics day at Valley Fair fame).  One of the labs involveds magnets and someone asked how much work it was to set it up and I quipped that magnetic forces do no work.  What was interesting is that whereas at Hamline my students would dutifully nod their heads, at the workshops the teachers pounced on the comment and asked how one magnet could pull another.  I think that's a great question and I can't wait to take it up in next semesters class on Electricity and Magnetism (PHYS 5940, I think).  The book I've chosen (by Griffith) does a great job of talking about how B-fields do no work with a few different examples.  Hopefully I'll be better prepared at the next MNSTA meeting!

We'll see if this is useful

I thought I'd start a blog for the physics department.  I think that this might come in handy for the work we're doing with teacher preparation in MN but it could be that alumni and current students find this useful too.  I don't like how blogger doesn't support latex natively like wordpress does but I think there are some interesting things I can do by linking this to my google reader account so show the external links that might be interesting.