Month: August 2017

This spring, each Wooster Junior physics major undertook a six-week scientific investigation of their own design, as a part of our junior independent study course. Watching their projects come to fruition over the course of the semester was a very rewarding experience for me, and I am happy to announce that each junior prepared a…

Walking – we all do it. But why do we walk so often? Why doesn’t everyone skip down the block to work? Aside from that being deemed as weird by society, walking is the most efficient way for people to move on earth due the gravity here. We’ve all experienced this in some way. You…

For my Junior Independent Study, I looked into some cool physics videos to find an interesting topic to explore. I found a youtube video about the University of New Mexico Couette cell apparatus for demonstrating laminar flow and decided that watching fluid blend together and then separate out again was an interesting concept. The project I designed…

The purpose of my experiment was to analyze whether the behavior of an RLC (Resistor, Inductor, Capacitor) circuit is noticeably affected by replacing the inductor with an oscillating spring. Common inductors take the form of solenoids which are helical coils of wire that are wrapped around a core. This core can be made of different…

This project uses an electronic circuit to demonstrate something called stochastic resonance. Stochastic resonance (SR) is present many places in nature–from dictating the timing of ice ages to aiding in fish hearing. So, what is it? SR is simply when a random noise signal serves to boost the strength of another, cleaner signal. Audio is…