Hover over the menu bar to pick a physics animation.

Welcome to physicsanimations.org

To contact me by email

I have been a fan of making physics animations for at least 40 years. If you could draw even good cartoons to show what physics are involved you've done something to help people understand how the world works.

I have held myself to higher standards in that all of my animations satisfy the laws of physics and are interactive so that the most pertinent parameters of the animation are adjustable by the learner, who you might call the viewer. But I feel that calling the person who looks at my animations a learner is justified.

I actually started working on this web site more than 10 years ago. However I started using Silverlight which is no longer available on the web. So the first five years or so can no longer be viewed as Silverlight. I also used the equation writer in Microsoft Word to show my analysis of the physics involved. That has turned out to be outmoded too. So some of my pages say "click for math" and these may not work right anymore.

About three years ago I discovered asciiMath and that works really really well. What started out being a very arcane language in Latex or mathJax was turned in to a very usable math typing language. I decided to program in HTML and JavaScript where previously I was programming my calculations in C sharp. You might think that that means my programs run slowly for the client. However all modern web browsers precompile the Javascript text that they receive. I tested JavaScript speed and it is just as fast C sharp and is much less cumbersome. The file size of JavaScript a very small fraction of that of c-sharp to accomplish the same goal. So JavaScript loads faster and runs just as fast and sometimes faster than C sharp. And it saves you the trouble of compiling it into a xaml file. And since this is a not a commercial enterprise that I'm doing, the learners can click a few buttons and read the code themselves

Here are some examples of the elements used in physicsanimations.org. First an equation written using asciiMath.

`A=int_0^2x^2dx`

Next, to control animations, a Start and Pause button as well as a Single Step checkbox.

Next a very simple slider to adjust a parameter of an animation.

Next a very simple canvas on which to draw our animation figures,

To view the HTML and javascript used for this simple page:
Mac OS: Hold Command|Option and press the i key.
Windows:Use Control+U (Used to be Control F5).
The source code files will appear on the right side of the page.