Great examples for 'lecture breaks' I teach elementary physics at a local university. One of the complaints of my students was I didn't relate the material to real-world examples.
The Flying Circus of Physics contains a huge number of examples relating basic physics principles to events/phenomena in the real-world. I usually use one or two of these examples per lecture as 'breaks' from the standard material. The students enjoy them and quickly become engaged in the discussion.
grat articles for thinking Opens the mind to concepts of Physics. I'm a high school physics teacher and just wish I had more time with my classes to explore the ideas presented by Dr. Walker. His video series Kinetic Karnival is also great, but I haven't been able to find it available to replace my damaged copies.This book relates physics to life! I am a retired science person who volunteers as an eighth grade science teacher. My primary notion is to convince the students that an understanding of the basic ideas of physics will enable you to comprehend more complex principals. To accomplish this, I am always searching for real life examples which demonstrate physics ideas. "The Flying Circus of Physics" provides a rich mix of these examples that makes the student see physics as part of their day-to-day life and not an abstraction.flying circus if you are a physics teacher this is a good one for your library. You won't use it everyday but it is nice to have.Congratulations Amazon for Taking My Suggestion For about a year, I've restrained myself from buying this book, since the reviews and description did not reflect the 2007 (once set at 2006) edition. About a month ago, I suggested they do something about it. I may have even written to Walker. At last, the description is up to date. However, a week ago I just decided to buy the book and write a mini-review. I'm just going to say a few words though.
It's a much larger format width/height wise. The answers are placed after the question and they are generally much longer responses than the first edition, which I thought were a bit too brief. These are completely new topics. The references are gone, but I do believe they are on his web site--in spades. There's quite a bit of supplemental info there. To find it his site just Google to "Jearl Walker" flying circus.
I suspect another difference in the book is the questions seem to have gotten further away from common basic physics. For example, in his first book he poses the question why does the cardboard stay in place when you turn over a glass of water with a cardboard over its mouth? Of course, there are many deeper questions in edition one. Nevertheless, his questions are interesting in the second edition. He's punctuated the book with some fun "short stories" like fire-walking. The book strikes me something like the approach of Mad about Physics, which also pulls examples from (a) physics journal in the manner of Walker's first edition. I don't quite see the "conceptual" tone as in Paul Hewitt's book Conceptual Physics, or in Epstein's Thinking Physics. Just different ways of thinking about physics.
