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Science Fair: Science on Stage hits Grenoble Lecture: Show thrills scientists of all ages Demonstration: Physics from above Forthcoming Events

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Reflections on 50 years of space flightSteven Chapman Guest editor

'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.' President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 12 September 1962.

It is now 50 years since the first artificial satellite was launched. This article looks at the early years of space travel and some of the key moments during that time.

The launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 was fuelled by science fiction as well as science fact. The field of early rocketry included the work of Russians Nikolai Rynin and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, American Robert Goddard, and German engineers Herman Oberth and Wernher Von Braun. All were directly inspired and influenced by early science fiction that heralded a space age decades ahead of time. The work of these pioneers led directly to the development of the technology needed to boost Sputnik skyward. After the launch of Sputnik, the context of the nuclear arms race opened the floodgates for a new wave of apocalyptic fiction.

Almost all elementary textbook explanations of the theory of flight rely heavily on Bernoulli's principle and the fact that air travels faster over a wing than below it. In recent years the inadequacies and, indeed, fallacies in this explanation have been exposed (see Babinsky's excellent article in 2003 Phys. Educ.38 497–503) and it is now appreciated that it is possible to provide a much simpler explanation in terms of Newton's laws. In this article it is shown how a couple of plausible assumptions are all that is needed to calculate a lot of interesting facts about wings.

In any conventional aircraft the wings provide the lift and the engines provide the thrust. In a bird, however, the wings have to provide the thrust as well as the lift. In this article we shall use the ideas presented in the first article of this series to develop a simple theory to explain how this comes about, and use it to predict some important characteristics of the flight of birds, including their wingbeat patterns and their minimum power requirements.

This article describes a device that makes airflow observable for aerodynamic experiments by attaching a fog machine to a wind tunnel. The device is a do-it-yourself construction with low-budget material.

The old physics question of whether it is possible to achieve locomotion of a sailboat if there is no wind at all by just blowing into the sail of the boat is discussed with respect to a modern everyday-life technological application, the thrust reversal of jet aeroplanes. This connection of basic physics with technology offers a new approach for studying problems dealing with conservation of momentum.

Physics is perceived by many students to be a difficult subject, and misconceptions about it are quite common not only among school students but also among undergraduates and pre-service postgraduate science teachers. In teaching the topic of gas pressure to primary student teachers studying in the Bachelor of Education programme at my institute, I adopted a constructivist approach to guide students to resolve a problem task that was adapted from an 'egg-in-the-bottle' demonstration. The students were highly motivated to accomplish the task, and there was evidence that they were constructing or reconstructing concepts about gas pressure and applying these concepts to solve the problem, although misconceptions still abounded. It is recommended that this type of approach be utilized by secondary school physics teachers to engage students in constructing concepts and to elicit and clarify their misconceptions about other physics topics.

The making of microscope devices using inexpensive or recovered materials is demonstrated. Examples of images illustrating the performance of such devices are presented. As a project at the undergraduate level, the task is effective in acquiring familiarity with optical imaging concepts and their practical implementation in the laboratory.

The combination of mathematical and conceptual difficulties makes teaching quantum physics at secondary schools a precarious undertaking. With many of the conceptual difficulties being unavoidable, simplifying the mathematics becomes top priority. The particle/wave-in-a-box provides a teaching model which includes many aspects of serious quantum physics, while avoiding most of the mathematics. In a Dutch quantum physics project for secondary schools, this model was adopted to play a key role. Much to our surprise, we ran into many more applications than we originally expected. In many instances the model yields order of magnitude estimates, for instance of atomic and nuclear size, or qualitative insights, for instance about energy levels, molecular bonding and electron pressure. Moreover, either directly or with minor modifications, the particle-in-a-box model provides reasonable approximations of a range of phenomena, including the absorption spectra of organic pigments, the mass of the proton and the spectra of quantum dots.

Toys can provide motivational contexts for learning and teaching about physics. A cheap car track provides an almost frictionless environment from which a quantitative study of conservation of energy and circular motion can be made.

Describing the world in terms of energy is necessarily quantitative: one must be able to do the sums for the description to gain a purchase. Whilst teaching younger children (say 11–14 years old) the full quantitative description is not available and this has made the introductory teaching of energy a contentious area. By focusing on representations of energy that respect this quantitative essence, without demanding that calculations are actually done, one can develop a manipulable model of the abstract idea of energy to be shared with children that is much more plausible, intelligible and fruitful than one based solely on a verbal description. Here I argue this case, indicating the ways in which such a model may be useful.

INTERVIEW The self-made rocket scientistSteve Bennett is CEO of Starchaser Industries, a high-technology group of companies specializing in the development, operation and commercialization of space-related products and services, which he founded in 1992.

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