Jake's Physics Things

I have made some visualizations/interactives/simulations to help explain certain physics concepts.

Note: Simulations are designed to be viewed on a computer with a large browser window. Graphical issues will likely occur if using a phone or smaller window.

Interactives

Mechanics

• Rolling Motion
  Simulate rolling motion as different combinations of translational/rotational motion. View velocity vectors at different locations (either as components, or the net velocity) to develop intuition for the no-slip condition. Track a point on the edge of the wheel to develop intuition for how its motion changes as the wheel rolls.

Oscillations & Waves

• Oscillator Phase (old, loads slowly)
  Visualizing simple harmonic motion as a mass lined up with a rotating phase circle. Adjustable phase constant and omega.
• Graphing Wave Functions
  Using an animated wave, this visual helps understand the process of making graphs for y(x) and y(t) to illustrate what they mean. To create a y(x) graph you "take a snapshot", and to create a y(t) graph you can select a particle to track.

Electricity & Magnetism

• Electric Potential
  This visual allows students to visualize electric potential through a gravitational analogy. You can place positive and negative charges in 2D and view equipotentials. It is then possible to switch to a 3D view which plots the electic potential as height. You can also add test charges and simulate how they move under the influence of the electric field.

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About

Suggestions

I'm looking for more ideas! If you have additional ideas for other visuals that would be helpful, and don't already exist, feel free to reach out. I don't have my email here to avoid spam, but if you have this web page you probably know me :). Most of these came out of my struggling to illustrate ideas well with just a whiteboard.

Technlogies

Source code will be made public soon, once I have time to clean some more things up. But if you're interested in doing something simular:

• PixiJS was used for most of the 2D simulations.
• The oscillator phase simulation was built with the Godot game engine (which is why it takes a long time to load, has no antialiasing, and bad accessability). Maybe one day I'll redo it.
• The electric potential simulation (which required 3D graphics) uses three.js.
• The more recently-updated simulations use Svelte to handle UI state, and daisyUI for the UI styling.