• Course Description
• Course Expectations
• Student Information Form

• See you in the Spring!

• Hand Shadow show by Raymond Crowe (YouTube) Amazing what a pair of hands and a light source can do!

• Sine Waves and Simple Harmonic Motion
• Acoustic and Vibration Animations: Dan Russell (Kettering University) has created some excellent animations of wave phenomena.
• Wave on a String: Play with string. From U. of Colorado PhET.
• Standing Waves on a String: The superposition of a wave and its reflection, see a standing wave develop in real time.
• Interference of Water Waves: From C.K. Ng collection of applets.
• Ripple Tank Simulation: Paul Falstad's Java simulation.
• Tsunami Explained: Nice animation from the BBC.
• Tsunami: NOVA Website
• Tsunami Physics: University of Washington general information on tsunamis.

Sound:

• The Physics of Music and Musical Instruments: A pdf of this text is available online.
• Sound Simulations: Select "Sound and Waves." Then click on "Sound" to see a visualation of soundwaves. Click on "Fourier: Making Waves" to try your hand at matching complex wave patterns to their component frequencies.
• Speed of Sound Calculator: Click on "Sound and Hearing" and then "Speed of Sound" at the bottom.
• Standing Longitudinal Waves: Standing Waves in Pipes
• Air Columns in Musical Instruments: Check out open and closed pipes.
• Beats: visualize the production of beats
• Breaking the Sound Barrier: PBS show on the first plane to travel faster than the speed of sound.
• Resonata: One of the many places where art and resonance meet.
• The Human Ear: One of many sites that explains how we hear through our ears.
• Try the Wave Game: Messing with Fourier Transforms
• More about Musical Instruments, reverberations etc.

Light and Color:

• RadioWave Simulation: Select "Radio Waves and Electromagnetic Fields." See how vibrating electric charge causes electromagnetic disturbances -- waves.
• Colored Shadows:
• Causes of Color:
• Color Mixing:Additive and subtractive color mixing (lights and pigments) try it yourself!
• Other Good Color Sites:
  • Color Matters
  • Color Mixing
• Laptop Screens: Did you know that laptop screens (and cell phone screens...) make use of polarized light, color mixing, and a whole lot more?

Optics:

• Shadow Puppets: Amazing what a pair of hands and a light source can do!
• Fun Lens Simulation: Real and Virtual Images
• Ray Tracing for Spherical Mirrors
• Funhouse Mirrors
• Atomospheric Optics: There's a whole lot more than just rainbows!

Diffraction, Interference and Quantum Physics

• Lasers: A good explanation of how they work, starting simple. Some very good animations.