This program was written to help people succeed in college science and engineering courses. It is a run-time book filled with explanations of physical phenomena in plain language, and illustrated by animated displays, graphs and tables. In this course we will build computer models of real physical systems, using the laws of nature to predict the future. You will be able to plot the trajectory of an orbiting satellite or conduct experiments in buoyancy. You may model the collision of billiard balls or conduct inclined plane experiments. Physics-1 also provides the means for you to create an infinite number of additional displays modeling systems of your own design. The only prerequisites for success in this course are a good high school mathematics background and a little curiosity. Click on the Course Outline to see the topics covered.
This program is also ideal for non-scientists who are just curious about what makes the world go around. You have an opportunity to simulate real world systems and experiment in a low cost/low risk way. Like any other field of study, science is easy when your intuition about how the world works is correct. Intuition is a learned skill. In this program you have a tool to sharpen your intuition about some of the laws of nature.
Physics-1 requires one of the 32 bit Windows operating systems, Win95/98/ME/2000/NT/XP, and 32 megabytes of RAM. The installed size of the program on the hard drive is about 3 megabytes. Click on the P1Setup link to download the installation program. Save it to a convenient location on your computer and run it to install Physics-1.
Here are some images generated by Physics-1. At the left is a shot of A gravity potential energy well. In animation this illustrates the variation in speed of a satellite in an elliptical orbit from the standpoint of conservation of energy. At the right is the amplitude surface of a standing plane wave. This illustrates in one image the position and time dependence of the displacement from a standing wave on a string, for example.
Here is a link to some additional screen shots of the program output.