What shall we explore today?

Position, velocity, acceleration

Position tells where an object is; velocity describes how quickly and in which direction position changes; acceleration describes how velocity changes.

Uniform linear motion

In uniform linear motion, an object travels along a straight line at constant velocity; distance grows in proportion to time.

Uniformly accelerated motion

Constant acceleration makes velocity change uniformly with time and position vary quadratically with time.

Crystal structures

Rotate simple-cubic, body-centered-cubic, and face-centered-cubic unit cells and compare their packing fractions.

The Venturi tube and airflow past an obstacle

A Venturi tube illustrating Bernoulli's law with real fluid particles, and a Lattice Boltzmann simulation of airflow around an obstacle.

The wavefunction, the Schrödinger equation, and the hydrogen atom

A genuine numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in five scenarios, plus a hydrogen-atom electron probability cloud sampled from the exact solution.

Condition for a standing wave on a string fixed at both ends

$L = n\lambda/2$, $n = 1, 2, 3, \ldots$ — the string length L must equal an integer number of half-wavelengths for a stable standing wave.

Newton's first law (inertia)

An object remains at rest or in uniform straight-line motion unless acted on by a force, or as long as the net force acting on it is zero.

The first law of thermodynamics

$\Delta U = Q - A$ — the change in a system’s internal energy equals the heat it absorbs minus the work it performs.

Mohammad Abdus Salam

Pakistani theoretical physicist who independently formulated the electroweak unification and founded the ICTP to support scientists in developing countries.

Adam Guy Riess

American astrophysicist whose analysis for the High-z team led to the accelerating-universe conclusion.

Alain Aspect

French physicist who performed the first stringent Bell tests — proving quantum entanglement is real.