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March Meeting 2018 – Day 1
I’m currently in Los Angeles for the American Physical Society March Meeting — the largest gathering of physicists in the world. This year there are almost 11,000 attendees, and more than 55 simultaneous sessions to choose from! There are physicists everywhere — hordes descending on the convention center at 8 am Monday to pick up…
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Student blog reports from their Junior Independent Study self-designed projects
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…
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Walker’s Walker: Building a Passive Robot for Active Learning (Jr IS guest blog by Justine Walker)
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…
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This is not black magic. This is physics. This is laminar flow. (Jr IS guest blog by Emma Brinton)
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…
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RLC circuit resonance with an oscillating inductor (Jr IS Guest blog by Kyle McNickle)
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…
