PhET

Thomas and Robin meet outside, at an appropriate social distance, to remember Tim Hardingham and introduce an interview with the PhET Head of Development Ariel Paul (@DrArielPaul). Surely all physics teachers have heard of this outstanding free source of simulations and demos provided by the University of Colorado Boulder.

Support PhET!

PhET was the brainchild of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman, and the 158 interactive SIMS are racing towards a billion downloads. Ariel tells us about the herculean efforts that go into developing new sims and keeping them up to date. It’s resource-intensive work and desperately needs your support. If you’ve used PhET sims, please do show them your appreciation.

You can donate directly or pay 89p for their official app for the HTML5 sims (and encourage all your students to buy it too).

 

John Travoltage

Brazil Nuts

Thanks to Sophie Constantine for this excellent video that explains why Brazil nuts are not especially radioactive.

Join in!

Please share ideas or successes – or indeed questions by messaging us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/physicstp.bsky.social .  You can also message us via our website contact form on every page of the web site at  the.physicsteachingpodcast.com, or email using the address given in the podcast (if we remember). We are moving away from X but can be found there as @physicstp.

Music

• Season 7: Physics Is Our Business by Miracles of Modern Science.
• Seasons 5 and 6: Crescents by Ketsa.
• Seasons 3 and 4: Disco Sheik by Podington Bear.
• Seasons 1 and 2: One legged equilibrist polka by Circus Homunculus.
• Occasionally we also use Cantina Rag by Jackson F. Smith.

The music is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License