Browsing the Journals

Carl Mungan, United States Naval Academy
mungan@usna.edu

Page 460 of the November 2017 issue of The Physics Teacher (http://aapt.scitation.org/journal/pte) has a nifty article explaining how to construct a boat propelled by a magnetohydrodynamic drive, like in the movie “The Hunt for Red October.” The demonstration highlights many of the downsides of such a propulsion system compared to what the movie portrays. On page 588 of the December 2017 issue, James Lincoln convincingly argues that slow-motion video greatly improves the pedagogy of many common physics demos. Finally the January 2018 issue has a variety of short articles that analyze the physics behind interesting effects such as an ice-hockey slapshot on page 7, the tendency for dirt to accumulate along edges of melting snow on page 10, optical deflection of light by prisms on pages 14 and 18, and properties of homopolar motors and generators on pages 47 and 61.

Romanelli proposes a Stirling cycle based on a polytropic (intermediate between an isothermal and an adiabatic) process on page 926 of the December 2017 issue of the American Journal of Physics (http://aapt.scitation.org/journal/ajp). McCreery and Greenside insightfully analyze the electric field of a uniformly charged cubic shell on page 36 of the January 2018, as a contrast to the familiar textbook examples of spherical and cylindrical shells for which the internal field is zero.

Article 065010 in the November 2017 issue of Physics Education experimentally investigates why a cup filled partly or completed with liquid, covered with a sheet of paper, and inverted does not necessarily spill its contents. The surprising demonstration of disassembling a charged capacitor consisting of a sheet of glass between two metal plates, handling the separated parts, and then reassembling the capacitor and finding it is still charged is discussed in article 065202 of the November 2017 issue of the European Journal of Physics. Article 065204 in the same issue investigates why fluorescent tubes begin to flicker before they burn out. Article 015002 in the January 2018 issue explains why Newton’s bucket cannot be used to determine earth’s rotation, the problem being that the necessarily finite size of the bucket means that earth’s gravity will be nonuniform over the surface of the liquid in the bucket. Other papers that caught my eye in the same issue are Hecht’s discussion of the arrow of time in article 015801, and measurement of the sodium doublet with a Michelson interferometer in article 015704. Both journals can be found online starting at http://iopscience.iop.org/journalList.

The November 2017 issue of Resonance has an article on page 1061 reviewing the properties of perovskite solar cells, a topic of current industrial interest. A spin coater in a dry box is mostly all one needs to prepare such devices, thereby making this research field accessible to undergraduates. In the same issue, a paper on page 1085 explains how the Rayleigh-Taylor instability is responsible for many of the rolling swirls seen in clouds, nebulae, and similar gas interfacial dynamics. These articles can be freely accessed at http://www.ias.ac.in/listing/issues/reso.

The November 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is devoted to polymers, with a wealth of articles about their properties, syntheses, and classroom experiments & demonstrations. The journal archives are at http://pubs.acs.org/loi/jceda8.

Article 020124 in Physical Review Physics Education Research at https://journals.aps.org/prper/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.13.020124 finds a significant correlation between personality types of students (such as their Myers-Briggs temperament) and their performance on the Force Concept Inventory which tests understanding of concepts in basic Newtonian mechanics. This study collected data measuring such correlations, but does not attempt to explain the cause of these correlations, nor how classroom pedagogy could be modified to address them.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.