Physics Library News

Attention Spring Physics course instructors!

Please send me a list of books you would like placed on reserve. If you are keeping the same books for spring that you used for fall, let me know. You can use the Online Reserve Request Form, send me an email, or put a note in my mailbox. If you are making a web page for your class, you can link your page to the class' reserve list after I put the books on reserve. There is no need to retype them. Just ask me if you have any questions.

Physics Library Spring 2013 hours

January 14 - May 8:
Monday - Thursday, 7:15am - 6:00pm
Friday, 7:15am - 5:00pm
Closed Saturday & Sunday
Exceptions:
Closed Monday, January 21, Martin Luther King Holiday
Spring Break, March 11-15, 7:15am-3:45pm, Monday-Friday

Physics Library Intersession Hours

December 22, 2012 - January 13, 2013:
Monday - Friday, 7:15 am - 3:45 pm
Closed Monday, December 24, 2012 - Monday, January 1, 2013
Closed Monday, January 21, 2013

Teaching Advanced Physics

Teaching Advanced Physics - Maintained by staff members at the Institute of Physics, the Teaching Advanced Physics (TAP) website provides a wealth of resources designed to help teach physics to advanced high school and college students. The materials here are divided into seven sections, including Electricity, Mechanics, Vibrations and waves, and Energy. Within each of these sections, visitors will find smaller "episodes" which represent a coherent section of teaching that can be covered in one or two lessons. Each episode includes illustrations accompanied by explanatory text that can be used to complement an existing lesson plan. The extensive site covers over 30 topics, including circular motion, Newton's law, drag forces, and kinematics.

Big Physics Prize

Stephen Hawking Is Among Scientists to Win Billionaire’s Big Physics Prize - The Milner Foundation announced on Tuesday that the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a team of seven scientists at CERN, the European research center for particle physics, had won a pair of $3-million prizes, just months after the foundation honored nine other scientists with a group of equally lucrative awards. The foundation, named for the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, also introduced the list of nominees for its 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize, which is worth $3-million. In a news release, the foundation said the CERN scientists were being honored for their work on the discovery of a new particle that fits the description of the elusive Higgs boson. The foundation lauded Mr. Hawking for his “deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.”

Sing About Science & Math: Lesson Plans

Sing About Science & Math: Lesson Plans  - If you have ever wanted to sing out loud and proud about oceanography, physics, or the natural world, this site is for you. This site is part of the larger Sing About Science & Math website which encourages young people to make a joyous noise about the world of science. This particular section of the site brings together lesson plans designed to encourage participation in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Visitors can scan through twenty or so lesson plans here including explorations of an "Ode to the Gaseous State" and a song about DNA sung to the ditty "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". Visitors can scan the items here by grade level and learn about the people responsible for their creation. Also, one can elect to submit a musical exploration of science for possible inclusion on the site.

Physics: Lesson Plans on the Internet

Physics: Lesson Plans on the Internet - Professor Norman Herr has worked tirelessly to promote science education through this professional site, and it remains a fine resource for science educators. Here visitors will find a vast range of resources related to teaching physics with a bit of chemistry thrown in for good measure. The site begins with a brief introduction of how to successfully search for such resources using well-known search engines such as Google. The materials are divided into areas that include Books, Lesson Ideas for Science Teachers, and Lesson Ideas for All Disciplines. The Lesson Ideas for Science Teachers area is a great place to start; it contains links to the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Science Education, NASA Educators, and the Mathematics and Science Education Gateway at Cornell. Of course, visitors shouldn't miss the Lesson Ideas for All Disciplines area, which includes links to the award-winning TeachNet site and the PBS TeacherSource site, which brings together audio and video clips.

Science.gov's 10th anniversary

Science.gov was launched in December 2002 and has broken new ground in interagency collaboration. Senior information managers representing 13 Federal agencies forged a consensus on how national science organizations could improve public access to the nation's rich and diverse scientific research information and partnered to create the Science.gov Web portal.

There are now more than 200 million pages in Science.gov, and the annual page views top 34 million, a 45-fold increase from the earliest days. The founding idea was to provide a comprehensive gateway to federal science information for those who might not know exactly where to find it. The interagency effort would raise scientific and technical literacy, serve as a foundation for future discoveries, and foster greater understanding of the public's return on investment from the government's science and technology efforts.