updated October 22th

Links for Enrichment

From the same museum that houses Galileo's finger, a lovely interactive tour of the Accademia del Cimento, including their work with Torricelli's Famous Experiment (a direct link to the animated explanation of the experiment isn't possible. Although the background material is interesting and short, you can get directly to the animations by clicking on "Torricelli's experiment" in the brown bar, and then clicking on the word 'experiment').

Was Galileo right about a feather and a hammer dropping at the same speed in a vacuum? In a word: yes.

The last moon landing with two crazy guys one of whom was a geologist. He gets really excited when he discoveres some "orange soil", on the moon! Here is the transcript and video (he's all business like until right about half way through)

Watt's Sun and Planet gear.

Morning Lesson Book Contents

• Motions of heat. A drawing showing how heat moves in a "natural" situation---perhaps steam rising up off a cup of cocoa. Please write a few sentences on the page describing what is going on, by which process heat is moving, and how you know.
• Your heat invention. A drawing of a device that takes advantage of the motion of heat for a useful purpose. Please write a few sentences on the page describing what is going on, and by which process heat is moving.
• The Torricelli Experiment: identify the important parts, explain why the mercury stays up in the tube (should include the words "pressure" and "air", what important observations can be made by tilting the apparatus, and why that makes sense. The link above may help.
• Describe your experimental apparatus for replicating the results of either Charles's Law or the Guy-Lussac Law. Note that to replicate Boyle's Law, which describes the relationship between pressure and volume at a constant temperature, we needed a device that could measure both the pressure and the volume while controlling the temperature (the piston did this by soaking up any heat generated). Note that I don't want you to design an experiment for Boyle's law. Those of you who dutifully copied the wikipedia entry for Boyle's Law may pay penance by either modifying that setup for a different law or keeping it, but describing what the flame is for.
• Story about the hottest or coldest you've ever felt, annotated with what you know about heat transport and phase changes.
• Specific Heat Experiment--where we put water, vinegar, and alcohol into a warm bath and timed how long they took to heat! In your portfolio 1) describe the experiment (a picture may help), 2) narrate the process by which data were taken, and 4) include the data table and plot.
• Engines! Please illustrate and explain two different types. The ones we covered in class include the theoretically ideal "Carnot" cycle, Gas and Diesel engines (you can only do one of these as they are so similar), steam engines, and stirling engines. You could also choose an engine we didn't cover, such as turbines, Wankel Rotary Engines (just four stroke engines, but with no piston!), two stroke engines, etc.

Please direct any inquiries to physics 'at' seattlewaldorf org.