What's New in The Physics Factbook™
The Physics Factbook™
Edited by Glenn Elert -- Written by his students
An educational, Fair Use website
topic index | author index | special index
7 June 2009
- The past two years were mild ones for The Physics Factbook™. Since I became the Science Research Coordinator at my day job, I haven't been teaching that many physics classes. Fewer physics classes means fewer physics students and thus fewer Factbook entries.
- Where we currently stand.
- 834 essays written by …
- 744 authors on …
- 798 topics
12 June 2007
- The Physics Factbook is back with so much new stuff it will make your brain
ache (in a good way). 2007 was the "Year of Physics C".
The class that requires physics as a prerequisite and calculus as concurrent
registration or better. The class that few are qualified for and even
fewer are willing to contemplate. The 2006-2007 academic year was the
first in my long career where I actually had a full class. (That's 34
fantastic students for those of you unfamilar with the way we do it here
in NYC.) The result: more special projects pages than ever before.
- Physics on film: Batman, Jackass, Sin City, Road Trip, Troy
- More superheroes: Hulk, Superman, and more Superman
- Serious stuff: cliff diving, seatbelts
- Video games: Super Mario Brothers, Madden NFL 2006
- The human body: blood pressure, shoe size
- Wake up, sleepy students! The Flying Screaming Monkey is bringing a calculus problem your way.
- Why doesn't this lab work? Blame the students or blame the equipment?
- And basketball! basketball!! basketball!!!
- Did I neglect to mention the usual praises? Midwood is the nation's premiere
large, urban, public high school for science education. We have more
Advanced Placement students than most schools have students. We have
more students than some school districts have citizens and they represent
more nations than an international conference on global warming. This
year we added …
- 75 new essays by
- 57 new authors (and 7 established authors) on
- 65 new topics (and 10 updated essays).
- Plus one special bonus page: Ten magnetic field diagrams.
Beautiful, hypnotic, disgusting, sometimes inexplicable, and 100% genuine.
(Idealized portrayals are for overpriced textbooks.)
11 June 2006
- To steal a line from the great philosopher of education, John Dewey, the purpose of education is growth -- the purpose of growth is more growth. Well, The Physics Factbook™ just continues to grow. This year I've added 58 new essays by 48 new and 9 veteran authors. This raises the totals to …
- 715 essays by
- 648 authors on
- 702 topics
- Once again I would like to highlight the outstanding special projects pages written by the students in AP Physics C.
- Physics of the Body (5 pages). Topics included
body proportion,
center of mass,
fingertip reaction time,
footwear and running, and
more acceleration perturbations of everyday living.
- Physics on Film (5 pages). Students analyzed videos looking to calculate dynamical quantities like acceleration, momentum, speed and power. Movies included
Dodgeball,
Harry Potter,
Lord of the Rings,
X-Men, and a
Honda Civic commercial.
- Miscellaneous (2 pages): Coefficients of restitution and How long do the subway doors stay open?(Not as long as they're supposed to.)
- Also, be sure to check out the other work my students did for the midwoodscience.org website.
- Regents Review (188 pages). Every multiple choice question from the past 4 New York State Regents Physics Exams is answered and explained. A good way to review for the big test.
12 June 2005
- The Physics Factbook™ celebrates its tenth year with 94 new essays. The volume of information has gotten so large now that it's hard to tell exactly how many items there are in the current edition. It appears that The Physics Factbook consists of …
- 656 essays on
- 644 topics by
- 607 authors
- The highlight of this year's collection are the special projects which include …
- Physics on Film (11 pages). Students analyzed movies (mostly car chase sequences) looking
to calculate dynamical quantities like distance, speed, acceleration
and force. Movies included
Bad Boys 2,
The Blues Brothers,
The French Connection,
Le Mans,
C'était un Rendezvous,
Spider-Man,
The Run, and
four short video clips.
- Students Choice (15 pages). Pages on a variety of topics chosen by the students (obviously). Coefficients of friction,
refractive indexes,
acceleration of an elevator and of the human body, the magnetic field of a MetroCard, and
electrical devices.
- Chaos Project (5 pages): In 2002 I had groups of students measure the fractal dimension of various objects or systems including
bread, broccoli, leaves, the coast of Maine, and changes in stock prices. I moved these pages from their original home at midwoodscience.org. They seemed a little bit lonely out there.
14 June 2004
25 June 2003
- Another successful year with 74 new entries. New pages will be Unicode Savvy, allowing quotation and citation of sources written in non-latin alphabets like Ελληνικά, Русский, 日本語 or اللغة العربية.
16 June 2002
- Now in its seventh year on the web, The Physics Factbook™ contains 404 essays on 368 topics written by 388 authors. Freshly uploaded today: 77 new entries including 17 graphs with data sets, 4 photographs, and two diagrams. Even with all the extra image files, The Physics Factbook™ is still bandwidth friendly. This year's entire output is only slightly larger than a floppy disk.
- Reorganized the entire site so it would be easier to manage. Clustered the essays into groups by year of first submission. Gave the site a more stylistically uniform look. Optimized and basically cleaned up all the junk code that had accumulated from years of tiny modifications. All pages (except the indexes) are now lighter in weight and load slightly quicker. Very distant users and those with clunky old modems may notice some improvement in performance.
20 June 2001
23 June 2000
- The end of another successful year. Look in the Author Index for the 93 newest essays.
16 December 1999
15 February 1999
Spring 1996
- This website was created sometime in the spring of 1996 at Columbia University in New York City. Nearly one hundred students participated in the second year of this project, but only eight made webpages. (At that time, most html editing was done by hand. The first pages I wrote for this website were all manually coded.)
Spring 1995
- The Physics Factbook™ is born as a response to administration requests for increased "portfolio assessment". Initially done as an all-paper activity, completed essays were saved for one year in accordance with state law and then tossed in the trash.
