Physlet? Physics: Interactive Illustrations, Explorations and Problems for Introductory Physics

The applets on this is just great for understanding many physics concepts. It covers most topics (mechanics, waves, electrostatics, magnetism etc), it has interactive menus so you can change the parameters in the experiments and it logs the output and plots them for you. Highly recommended for any high school student and even university students. An excellent teaching and learning tool. I highly recommend it to my students since it moves abstract concepts closer to the concrete stage. If you are a parent, this is a MUST have for your child to aid their learning of physics concepts. The downside is some of the applets do not work but they are a small minority. Note you need to enable the java function on your browser, just go to Sun Microsystems website, it should work.

This book is an attempt to teach modern physics to students by enabling them to visualize various physical phenomena via Java applets designed to demonstrate various physics concepts - thus the name "physlets". The book and its accompanying CD contain around 250 such physlets that span a broad spectrum of physics courses, although the emphasis is on quantum theory. The book has some discussion of the concepts involved, particularly in the context of the parameters of the particular Physlet being examined, but this really wasn't meant to be a textbook. It's just a supplementary text for a variety of physics courses in which visualization of a concept is a real roadblock in learning. The book has 200 exercises, and they are not what you would expect in a physics book. The problems largely consist of running a physlet and answering some questions about your observations, or you are asked to change the input parameters to a physlet and explain what you observe versus what you observed when the default parameter was active. At no point does the author assume you are a Java programmer yourself and ask you to code up your own physlet, although if you know how, that would probably be a very educational activity. The following is the table of contents: Chapter 1: Introduction to Physlets Part 1: Special Relativity Chapter 2: Space and Time in Special Relativity Chapter 3: Relativistic Mechanics Part 2: The Need for a Quantum Theory Chapter 4: From Blackbody to Bohr Chapter 5: Wave-Particle Duality Part 3: Quantum Theory Chapter 6: Classical and Quantum-mechanical Probability Chapter 7: The Schrödinger Equation Chapter 8: The Free Particle Chapter 9: Scattering in One Dimension Chapter 10: The Infinite Square Well Chapter 11: Finite Square Wells and Other Piecewise-constant Wells Chapter 12: Harmonic Oscillators and Other Spatially-varying Wells Chapter 13: Multi-dimensional Wells Part 4: Applications Chapter 14: Atomic, Molecular, and Nuclear Physics Chapter 15: Statistical Mechanics