Presents a collection of physics demonstrations that illustrate key concepts using easily accessible materials, with information providing a theoretical background for each demonstration

". . . dipping into this collection is much like opening a holiday gift and discovering a marvelous little toy that then holds your attention by some curious performance. . . . This book precisely reflects the way science education should be, especially at the introductory level." --From the foreword Here is a collection of physics demonstrations costing very little to produce yet illustrating key concepts in amazingly simple and playful ways. Intended for instructors, students, and curious lay readers, these demonstrations make use of easily accessible, everyday items: food coloring and glycerine swirled and then "unmixed" in a container demonstrate aspects of the entropy law; raw eggs thrown with full force at a sheet but not breaking illustrate Newton's second law (f=ma); and the reflection off a glass Christmas tree ball is the focus of an explanation on "turning the world inside out." Many of the demonstrations are either new or include innovative twists on old ideas, as in the author's simplified version of the classic "Monkey and Hunter" problem, which substitutes "diluted gravity" on an inclined plane for large apparatus. Each demonstration outlines the objective, the equipment needed, and the procedure, including, in many instances, ways for a teacher to perform the demonstration on an overhead projector. Throughout the book concrete examples are accompanied by enough theoretical background to enhance a reader's basic understanding of physical principles. Lab instructors will find that demonstrations containing a quantitative component work well as mini- experiments and as ways to illustrate the results of calculations. These diverse and flexible demonstrations will serve a wide range of educational levels, from middle school physical science to university physics.

Physics has the reputation of being difficult to understand and remote from everyday life. Robert Ehrlich, however, has spent much of his career disproving these stereotypes. In the long-awaited sequel to Turning the World Inside Out and 175 Other Simple Physics Demonstrations, he provides a new collection of physics demonstrations and experiments that prove that physics can, in fact, be "made simple." Intentionally using "low tech" and inexpensive materials from everyday life, Why Toast Lands Jelly-Side Down makes key principles of physics surprisingly easy to understand. After laying out the basic principles of what constitutes a successful demonstration, Ehrlich provides more than 100 examples. Some of the more intriguing include: Terminal Velocity of Falling Coffee Filters; Spinning a Penny; Dropping Two Rolls of Toilet Paper; Avalanches in a Sand Pile; When to Add the Cream to Your Coffee; Deep Knee Bends on a Bathroom Scale; Recoil Force on a Bent Straw; Swinging Your Arms While Walking; Estimating the Net Force on a Moving Book; and, of course, Why Toast Lands Jelly-Side Down. The book begins with a practical introduction on how to design physics demonstrations. The benefits of designing one's own "demos" are numerous, but primary among them is an increased understanding of basic physics. For many people who teach the principles of physics, demonstrations seem dauntingly complex, filled with hard-to-find equipment and too many possibilities for failure. The demonstrations described in this book are exactly the opposite. Ehrlich describes them with characteristic candor: "You can fit many of them in your pocket, bring them to your class without any set-up required, and best of all, you need not fear that your demo will more likely illustrate Murphy's laws rather than Newton's." For anyone with even the slightest interest in physics, Why Toast Lands Jelly-Side Down is filled with learning opportunities. For everyone who is studying physics or teaching the subject at any level, from amateur scientists to professional teachers, it is an essential resource.

A whimsical construction of an imaginary dialogue between two people intent on understanding esoteric topics that range from human sexuality to physics. Ehrlich (physics, George Mason U.) is dedicated to making the sciences fun and interesting, and though the conceit is "cute," the information it contains is dynamic and scientifically sound, posing interesting questions and speculations on life in the universe, human behavior, perception, gravity, material properties, physics, time, space, and a sample list of "What ifs?" to pursue on one's own. The answer to the title's question (we were dying to know) is that, in part, it's all a matter of probabilities. The promotional material says the cartoons are humorous. Not. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Here is a collection of physics demonstrations costing very little to produce. Yet illustrating key concepts in amazingly simple and playful ways, Intended for instructors, students, and curious lay readers, these demonstration make use of easily accessible, everyday items.

These demonstrations will fascinate, amaze, and teach students the wonders and practical science of physics. Physics Demonstrations illustrates properties of motion, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, and light. All demonstrations include a brief description, a materials list, preparation procedures, a provocative discussion of the phenomena displayed and the principles illustrated, important information about potential hazards, and references. Suitable for performance outside the laboratory, Physics Demonstrations is an indispensable teaching tool. This book includes a DVD of the author performing all 85 demonstrations.

With reference to copious case studies, this book attempts to give a broad and comprehensive view of the multiplicity of forms taken by metaphor in physics. A diachronic presentation of the views hitherto advanced on the role of metaphor in the natural sciences provides an introduction to the crucial issues. By means of a broad definition of metaphor as a lexical, semantic, and conceptual phenomenon, metaphor is identified at various levels of physics discourse: in metatheory and methodology; in the sociology of the origin and evolution of science; in theory and conceptualization, including physics models; in education; and finally in linguistic expression, including terminology. Whereas historians and theoreticians of science reduce the question of metaphor in physics to the question of the role of scientific models, where one area of physics provides concepts and structures for another area, the perspective adopted here is that of cognitive semantics. The study inquires into the way in which concept-formation and terminology in physics avails itself of the metaphoric bent immanent in everyday language, conceptualizing abstract ideas in spatial terms, inanimate things as intelligent, measurable phenomena in terms of the visual. Attention is also given to the way in which metaphoric processes make it possible to integrate new knowledge into old and sometimes obsolete structures rather than eliminating those structures altogether.