Author Archives: BruceSherwood

A physicist asked me, “One thing I noticed in most recent introductory physics textbooks is the slow disappearance of calculus (integrals and derivatives). Even calculus-based physics now hardly uses any calculus. What is the reason for that?” Here is what … Continue reading →

A non-physicist friend expressed deep puzzlement about measurements at opposite ends of the Universe being somehow linked. Here I describe what I take to be the current state of theoretical and experimental knowledge about the “spooky action at a distance” … Continue reading →

As a young professor at Caltech I was assigned to teach intro physics (1966-1969), and I had the great good fortune to teach intro physics using the “Feynman Lectures on Physics” as the textbook. This experience had a huge impact … Continue reading →

An aspect of the discovery of the Higgs boson to celebrate is the possibility of prediction in science — in this case, the prediction that a certain particle should exist so that the world can behave as it does, and … Continue reading →

Neutrinos undergo only weak interactions, which are associated with slow decays. For example, a neutron (electric charge 0) outside a nucleus (a “free” neutron) decays due to the weak interaction into a proton (electric charge +1), an electron (electric charge … Continue reading →

Someone wrote to me with questions about work vs pseudowork (extended system vs point-particle system). At one point he asked me to analyze a subsystem of an accelerating car, the car minus the wheels, and I learned something in the … Continue reading →

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN SUPERSEDED BY THE ARTICLE “A time line for VPython development” ————————————————————————————- You are invited to try out GlowScript (“Graphics Library on Web”), an easy to use 3D programming environment inspired by VPython, but which runs in … Continue reading →

This is in response to the question, “So the speed of light differs depending on medium, right? Is this also true for neutrinos?” This question from a friend was prompted by the recent measurements at CERN suggesting that neutrinos might … Continue reading →

I’ve recently read three excellent popular physics books that I strongly recommend. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science (available in Kindle) Lawrence Krauss (author of The Physics of Star Trek) None other than Freeman Dyson wrote a laudatory review … Continue reading →

People often ask how Ruth Chabay and I came to develop the Matter & Interactions curriculum, and particularly why we felt it essential to include computational modeling. Starting in the late 1980s at Carnegie Mellon University, Ruth Chabay and I worked … Continue reading →