...
Skip to main content Skip to footer site map
The U.S. Naval Academy
Carl E. Mungan, Professor
Carl E. Mungan, Professor

'Web Watch' Column

I have collected together here the pieces that I have prepared for APS's Forum on Education Newsletters. Items have been updated where appropriate since the original columns were written.

  • NSF has a collection of physics discoveries that began with their support.
  • AT&T has put many of their tech archives online.
  • Vega Science Trust has many videos on their website, notably including four of Richard Feynman.
  • A set of physics pages are at Inside Science supported by AIP.
  • An interesting hypothesis connecting the second law of thermodynamics to the evolution of life has been proposed. Perhaps not surprisingly, the reader comments at its end are about four times longer than the main article itself.
  • Going back to even more foundational issues than the origin of life, read Alan Guth’s remarks about the Big Bang.
  • MIT’s Media Lab has a webpage devoted to its Fluid Interfaces Group.
  • Here is a thoughtful discussion with videos of the demonstration of a long chain of beads leaping fountain-style out of a jar onto the floor.
  • Science in School is a European science education web journal.
  • Optical circulators are like one-way traffic circles used to measure backscattering from fiber lasers. An acoustic analog has now been constructed.
  • Scientific American has a fascinating video explaining the classic puzzle: If you pull straight back on the lower pedal of your bicycle, will the bike move forward or backward? Without spoiling too much, I will simply say that both answers are experimentally achievable! Go watch it.
  • Okay, it’s not physics, but here is a cool site where you can listen to various animal sounds recorded at various places around the globe.
  • A new class of efficient solar cells based on perovskite materials have also been found to make good lasers.
  • AAPT’s journal The Physics Teacher is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary of publication this year. Check out its anniversary booklet in Flash format.
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics has been made freely available in HTML.
  • Here is a good webpage to explore engineering topics ranging from basic to advanced.
  • Do you remember the Macintosh program called HyperCard? It consisted of virtual cards of information and images. Links between different cards would allow one to browse from topic to topic, finding information of interest. The HyperPhysics web pages, each of which look like roughly letter-sized cards, are based on the same idea.
  • The electric field created in the wake of a laser pulse passing through and separating charges in a plasma can be used to accelerate electrons to high energies over short distances. The University of Texas at Austin recently achieved a record 2 GeV over a span of 1 inch.
  • Here is a well-written module encouraging the involvement of undergraduates in research experiences.
  • The American Society for Engineering Education has made its flagship journal Prism freely available.
  • There has rightly been a huge positive buzz about the a capella YouTube video teaching string theory.
  • NASA has a web site devoted to Earth-observing satellites.
  • I was intrigued by the discussion that nanoscale heat engines are fundamentally less efficient than larger devices because of the breakdown of thermodynamics when applied to systems of few particles.
  • A fun new site for asking and answering unusual pointed questions is Quora.
  • Nowadays there is a lot of interest in metrics on individual journal articles. You can download a handy browser bookmark tool that will instantly look up citation details for any webpage that includes a Digital Object Identifier for an article.
  • Looking for good background music in your office? I’m partial to Psychedelic Ambient Trance and to NPR’s Echoes.
  • Have you seen IBM’s incredible movie A Boy and his Atom?
  • The University of California Museum of Paleontology has built a website called Understanding Science: How Science Really Works.
  • John Denker has written a more careful analysis of how an electrophorus works than the usual oversimplified explanations.
  • GlowScript is a software environment for creating 3D animations such as of a spring-and-ball model of an atomic solid. Be sure to see the example programs with code.
  • Annenberg always has well-crafted instructional materials. Your students may enjoy Amusement Park Physics in classic or flashed formats.
  • Several different pages discuss the Navy's plans to deploy a solid-state laser weapon aboard a ship next year. Try this page or this site.
  • Scientific American has a site entitled Sixty-Second Science with minute-long MP3 podcasts.
  • What happens if a meteorite of specified size and density slams into the Earth (hitting water or rock) with a given impact angle and speed? Try simulating it.
  • Amazon probably paid a fortune to buy this small company. Find and create lists of good books on various topics at GoodReads.
  • If you are a Mac user, as I am, you may like this list of science resources (mostly chemistry, but with some physics overlap).
  • A variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma allows the computer to essentially force your average score to be fixed, to rise, or to fall. If anyone sees you, tell them you're not playing a game, you're doing operations research!
  • Carleton hosts a discussion of Guided Discovery Problems. In the left menu you will find links to all kinds of other pedagogical resources.
  • NASA has been trying for a long time to perfect solar sailing in space. Next year it will try to deploy a sail over 1000 square meters in size.
  • SPS has a site devoted to Careers Using Physics, including job resources and college & graduate school admissions.
  • The briefly titled Why-Sci website is a collection of snippets written by scientists to explain current research topics to the general public.
  • Sites with photos and descriptions of physics demos are often helpful to instructors teaching a new course. University of Florida's page is seen on the Physics Department Demonstration Page.
  • Puzzles are fun in physics. But mathematicians like to get in on the fun too. A lengthy list of mathematical articles related to physics puzzles is online at this verbose link.
  • Check out the Scale of the Universe animation created by two teenagers.
  • I have not yet tried using it, but there is a free tool to convert PDF documents into HTML pages.
  • Wolfram has hundreds of interactive physics demonstration animations.
  • What young person could resist videos about the physics of race car driving?
  • Take a look at three substantial American RadioWorks presentations in a series entitled Don't Lecture Me.
  • If you teach intermediate-level physics with substantial calculus content, you'll likely find something useful here. Examples include a short derivation of the sum of the reciprocal integers squared, various kinds of average distances from the earth to the sun, and a bug problem.
  • Westfall's biography of Newton has been strongly recommended to me. Put it on your summer reading list.
  • The University of Nottingham has a series of sixty videos built around various symbols denoting key concepts in physics and astronomy. (To be fair, they invented a few nonstandard symbols, such as a silhouette of a drinking bird, in contrast to traditional symbols such as physical constants, the planets, and so on.) I think the coefficient of restitution demonstration (symbol "r" near the end of the list) of tiny balls bouncing between compartments on a vibrating platform is pretty nifty.
  • There has been lots of positive buzz about the seven videos of Feynman's Messenger lectures (delivered at Cornell University in 1964) on Microsoft's Project Tuva site.
  • There are also plenty of good textbooks appearing (for free!) on the web these days. For the intro physics course, you would probably want to take a look at the Light and Matter series. Need a reference handbook of advanced math functions? It's hard to beat Abramowitz and Stegun for comprehensiveness.
  • Do you have a question about how physics explains everyday phenomena? Well, Louis Bloomfield claims he can explain how everything works. I'll leave it to you to try and stump him, if you can!
  • John Denker has a very extensive web site about how airplanes fly. It includes not only the usual discussion of various common fallacies about wings, but plenty of practical physics for real pilots.
  • Lately I've enjoyed perusing some of the articles at Inside Higher Ed.
  • The Nobel prizes were announced recently. A complete description of the physics prizes are in chronological order.
  • My favorite physics blog is Built on Facts written by graduate student Matt Springer at Texas A&M. I like it because I share the author's interest in statistical mechanics, mathematical physics, and science fiction. It helps too that his posts are only a few paragraphs long, stick to a single topic at a time, and occur about 5 times a week. (Who has time for rambling posts several times a day?)
  • I also highly recommend the Advice column and the Blogs of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I make it a point to read them once a week, typically on Fridays. They are loaded with excellent commentary and opinions about all topics academic.
  • While none of us wants to subscribe to too many email listservers (you do have a life beyond the internet, don't you?) I strongly recommend the PHYS-L digest (make sure you sign up for the digest version, unless you want to receive 20 or more individual postings per day). It's a good source for asking about and discussing issues related to physics teaching. For academics in general, two other excellent resources are Tomorrow's Professor and The Irascible Professor, each of which emails out articles a couple of times of week related to the life of a professor.
  • A good site for readable summaries of recent scientific research can be found at Spotlight, which highlights important new articles in APS's physics journals.
  • Project Galileo at Harvard is a repository of materials based on Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching. A broader collection of online resources supporting teaching and learning in physics and astronomy is comPADRE.
  • You have signed up for free Educator Access to Chegg, haven't you? Many of your students are probably paying $9.95/month to get access to detailed solutions to textbook problems at this site. Have you looked to see what they can see?
  • Finally, there are some great physics movies on the web (other than on YouTube). Try the classic Frames of Reference, the complete 52-program set of The Mechanical Universe and Beyond, and The Video Encyclopedia of Physics Demonstrations.
This is an official U.S. Navy Web Site. URL: https://www.usna.edu   Page Last Updated: 2025-12-10