What it shows:

A point light source will produce seemingly sharp shadows which turn out to be not at all sharp when viewed under magnification. Narrow interference bands are seen within the shadow of a straight edge while more complicated shapes yield more complicated interference bands and striations.

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What it shows:  A room-size laser interferometer with audio signal output. A standing wave is produced whenever a wave is reflected back on itself. A resonant cavity requires a second reflection so that the twice reflected wave has the opportunity to be in phase with the original wave. Here, laser light is reflected from a half-silvered mirror (mounted on a wall) so as to return to the laser and be reflected again by the laser. Movement of the wall by half a wavelength is sufficient to change the cavity formed between laser mirror and wall mirror from one resonant...

View with the camera off to one side looking at the unmagnified object.

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Play different notes by shortening the coil.

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What It Shows

A large magnet with a small cylindrical gap allows a stream of liquid nitrogen to pass over and through. Poured liquid oxygen hangs between the poles in the strong field until it boils away.

The circuits are built into large wood boards that mount easily onto an easel. The boards are labeled using conventional symbolism. Bulbs and batteries are easily removable--just be careful not to burn your fingers on the hot bulbs!

Parallel vs Series Circuit

Which bulb will be brightest in each circuit?

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Homemade chemistry-lab style battery in a beaker.

This is actually just show and tell, lead plate and lead/lead oxide plate in a battery jar.

Use a gel cell battery to show electrical current at an integer multiple of the cell voltage between lead and lead oxide in sulfuric acid. Two volts is not as useful as six volts, or twelve and more.

Copper and zinc plates connected by micro-ammeter; your hand completes the circuit.

Clean copper and zinc sheet metal stock is cut into strips or pads. Alligator clip a zinc strip and a copper strip and plug the leads into a modern multimeter. DC 2V scale should cover the 1.09V that we expect from a zinc/copper battery at standard conditions of 1 Molar electrolyte and room temperature.

Our fingers are a network of electrolytic conductors, with more or less conductance (depending on moisture and salt). Pressed to the metal strips, adjacent fingers complete the circuit and...

Insulating glass becomes a conductor of electricity when heated red-hot with a blowtorch. (m) (T+)

What it Shows

At room temerature, glass is almost as good an insulator as hard rubber. When heated to 1000 K, however, glass has a resistivity of less than 10⁷ ohm-meters (Purcell¹ fig. 4.8 pp 140). As glass becomes molten the once immobile ions are able to drift further between collisions under the influence of an applied electric field (Purcell pp 139). We can dramatically observe this decreased resistance using a blowtorch and a few incandescent...

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