Some demonstrations are really not as clever as we thought they might be. We have talked about how to teach aspects of the Coriolis force recently, and just to spice it up: here is one thing that I tried that totally didn’t work out. The idea was to have one student slowly and steadily turn a […]
So how do we teach about the Coriolis force? The following is a shortened version of an article that Pierre de Wet and I wrote when I was still in Bergen, check it out here. The Coriolis demonstration A demonstration observing a body on a rotating table from within and from outside the rotating system […]
How can you be moving in one frame of reference, yet not moving in another? We talked about the difficulty of different frames of reference recently, so today I want to show you a quick movie on how the seemingly paradox situation of moving in one frame of reference, yet not moving in another, can […]
An experiment showing how seemingly straight trajectories can be transformed into curly ones. One of the phenomena that are really not intuitive to understand are fictitious forces. Especially relevant in oceanography: The Coriolis force. The most difficult step in understanding the Coriolis force is accepting that whether or not a trajectory appears straight or curved […]
