Davidson professor taking physics off the page
DAVIDSON – Students across the world don’t have to learn physics from static pictures anymore.
Science Magazine honored Davidson College Brown Professor of Physics Wolfgang Christian and his collaborators with the monthly SPORE (Science Prize for Online Resources in Education) prize in its November issue for Open Source Physics, a digital library of physics models, from two-dimensional motion to quantum approximation techniques.
Francisco Esquembre, associate professor of Mathematics at the University of Murcia, Spain and Christian created about half the simulations in the library, with the rest created by contributors. ComPADRE Digital Library Technical Director Lyle Barbato runs the site’s library programming.
Christian and his colleagues created this digital library to fill a void that flat images and verbal descriptions of physical concepts leave.
“The world is dynamic,” Christian said. “It moves. Sometimes the motion is real, such as when you throw a baseball. Sometimes the motion is more abstract; it’s some mathematical idea that’s evolving in some way. Maybe it’s evolving in time, but it could be evolving in other ways, such as statistically or probabilistically. But by actually seeing that evolution, you can understand better what’s going on in the model than just simply looking at a picture.”