Physics

Ceramics and glasses dry perfectly well in the dishwasher, but plastic items seem to remain steadfastly wet

I thought it’d be good to show my A-Level students how to model an electromagnetic wave using a sinusoidal wave function for the electric and magnetic fields, and how these can be substituted into Maxwell’s Equations to derive the speed of light. There are a few ways to derive the speed of light from Maxwell’s…

In a Year 12 lesson on Tuesday I realised that I was asking the students to perform a simple experiment they’d done twice before: once in Year 7 and once in Year 10. Of course, this time around it was to be more complex because we were going to use light gates, but still the…

I’ve heard that teachers of mathematics tell their students that a line is always straight, and so a line of best fit is always straight. I’ve heard that teachers of mathematics say that there are also curves of best fit, but that these are not lines, because they are not straight. Consider a graph showing…

According to the Rayleigh-Jeans’ Law, where B is the power emitted let unit area per unit solid angle per unit wavelength for a given wavelength and temperature, T is the temperature of the body, lambda is the wavelength of radiation emitted by the body, and k is Boltzmann’s constant. This classical physics equation can be…