Actually this is what makes it easier for us older folk to understand what the common language may be saying mathematically.

As I mention also, Thomas Banchoff is readying the mind for “fifth dimensional views?” I mean you know that computer screen analogy and the “two dimensional view” becoming something much more complex?

(Hint there is a way to cheat and remove energy from the system without removing atoms.)

Also, do you know why thermodynamics works? Because being Maxwell’s Demon is really hard:

http://ajs.net/maxwell.htm

I remember I heard a similar talk by Weiman shortly after he got the Nobelprize. He showed several of the applets and I ended up spending quite some working time playing around with them

I also recall he said that the ‘average brain’ is only able to process 7 new information items per hour. I find myself frequently thinking that seminar speakers used up my seven items already with the introduction.

(I am just sitting in a talk by Antoniadis at the Planck 2006 conference. He already used up all my items for the whole day.)

Best,

B.

This Physics 2000 site, though, could come in handy–I’m teaching a third-semester physics class at a community college in the fall, and there’s likely to be some stuff here I can use for the class, directing students to this page and letting them know what applets apply to the concepts we’re currently discussing. I’ll have to take a closer look at the site and correlate the applets there with my syllabus…

Soon to be snoring like an elephant with stuffed sinuses (to add to the animal comparisons).

When I was teaching at one school (we used the old Nuffield ‘A’ Level course), we used to use programming to explain S.H.M and exponential decay; we’d get the kids to design BBC Basic code that simulated them stepwise (because the course didn’t require calculus so they didn’t get to solve the differential equations but this way they could still understand the important issue of how the shapes of the graphs arose) and then, as it became clear that students were generally getting worse at programming, we got them to do it with Excel. It was always a bit of a headache, though. Purpose-written demos are better (our HoD had a nice one demonstrating heat transfer in terms of microscopic configurations).

In my days as an A Level student, however, like yours, we got a simple Casio calculator and a bag of cold gravel and counted ourlselves lucky.

Certainly much better than my diagrams.