Physics Flashlets
Michael Fowler
See also our Applets!
This is a collection of Flash animations to make learning
physics easier! They were created by myself and my students Jacquie Hui Wan
Ching and Heather Welch, and Michael Timmins and Aris
Stylianopoulos, in the summer of 2003. Some of these flashlets are not
quite perfect yet, but we’re working on it. They do of course require you to
have a Flash player on your machine. The player can be downloaded for free from
Macromedia.com 
.
Pythagoras: prove Pythagoras’ Theorem fast by moving triangles around with your mouse.
Eclipse of the Moon: a short movie of the Moon moving through the Earth’s shadow, and how it appears from Earth.
Kepler’s Laws: construct your own planetary orbits and check Kepler’s Laws!
The Inner Planets: a movie of the inner planets in orbit ... and here are the Outer Planets.
Newton’s Cannon on a Mountain: Newton imagined a cannon firing horizontally from a mountaintop far above the atmosphere: he showed a fast enough cannonball would go into orbit.
Trip to Mars! Try your skill at shooting a probe from the Earth to a close encounter with the Red planet.
Jupiter Slingshot Find out for yourself how a gravitational boost from a moving planet can get you to the far reaches of the Solar System.
The Doppler Effect Animation shows expanding rings of sound—and a microphone clicks as each ring hits. Dutch Version
Carnot Cycle: the Carnot engine in action! You can slow it down to see what’s going on, and choose other values of pressure and volume to vary the cycle.
Michelson-Morley Experiment: an animation of the beautiful experiment to detect the aether that found nothing.
Lightclock: Einstein’s famous clock bouncing light between two mirrors is animated, to show just why taking the speed of light the same in all inertial frames leads inevitably to time dilation.
Young’s Interference Experiment An animation that builds up the two-slit interference pattern by adding the two waves sequentially for a series of points on the screen.
Phases of Venus An animation of Venus in orbit, with the sunlit portion of the surface viewed from different perspectives. (htm file)