Mechanics Short Story, part 1 Mechanics Short Story, part 2 Mechanics Short Story, part 3 Movies on classical Mechanics type Problems. The effect of an external sinusoidal force The effect of damping The resonance effect Projectile motion Force fields A field with nonzero curl The gravitational field The field around a point mass The gravitational potential energy The potential energy around a point mass Noninertial forces The coriolis force Dan Russell's Research on Piano Hammers Dan Russell, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Applied Physics, GMI Engineering & Management Institute in Flint, MI This page is an attempt to share some of my research on the nonlinear behavior of piano hammers, and the effects of this nonlinearity on the hammer-string interaction. The University of Maryland Computer Tutorials in Physics: Pulses A number of identical masses are connected to each other by identical springs. The springs are assumed to have negligible mass. The first spring is connected to a rigid wall on the left as shown in the figure below. The pattern repeats to the right for a long distance. Chaos in the Driven Pendulum This applet illustrates the driven pendulum: a rigid, plane pendulum whose point of attachment oscillates vertically. The applet animates the pendulum's motion and plots the angle and angular velocity each time the attachment point reaches the bottom of its cycle. Such a plot is called a Poincaré section. The Simple Plane Pendulum The simple plane pendulum. Phase plane analysis, with and without damping. This applet allows the user to set the damping and initial angle and angular velocity. It then animates the motion of the pendulum and plots its trajectory in the phase plane. Orbital Mechanics The Kepler problem. Orbital motion under Newtonian gravity. This applet allows the user to set the relative energy of two bodies. It then animates the motion in the rest frame of one of the bodies and in the effective potential diagram, and calculates some of the properties of the orbit numerically. Coriolis and centrifugal forces Coriolis and centrifugal forces. "Fictitious" forces caused by acceleration of the reference frame. A kid riding around on a turntable throws a ball horizontally, and the applet shows top views of its trajectory as seen from the turntable and from the earth. Also shown are the ball's velocity (red), the centrifugal force (blue), and the coriolis force (magenta). The user can vary the speed and angle at which the kid throws the ball. Can Gravity be Induced? This paper will demonstrate that it is possible to create the force of gravity without a corresponding quantity of mass. PHY 419, Classical Mechanics from Jorge Pullin at Penn State University Assignments (TeX) and tutorials (Mathematica) online, not much original Web development Vibration and Waves Animations The links below contain animations which visualize certain concepts concerning Vibration and Waves (sound and light).The choice of animations coincides with topics covered in the courses PHYS-230, Physics III: Waves, and PHYS-580, Acoustics, Noise, and Vibration, which I am currently teaching at GMI. Coupled oscillations Normal modes and more general motions The user sets the initial positions of the bodies either by sliding them along the track or by clicking on one of the light blue bars in the frequency spectrum, which puts the system into its corresponding normal mode. The frequency spectrum of the resulting motion is shown by the dark blue bars. The number of bodies can be varied from 1 to 7.