Teaching Electromagnetism Using Advanced Technologies

This is an early site. Our animations have gotten much much MUCH better. Go to this link for our later material.

Animations created using Discreet's 3D Studio MAX.

This work is supported by NSF Grant #9950380, an MIT Class of 1960 Fellowship, The Helena Foundation, the MIT Classes of 51 and 55 Funds for Educational Excellence, the MIT School of Science Educational Initiative Awards, and MIT Academic Computing.

Faraday's Law (3.3 Meg QT) and Creating A Dipole (3.0 Meg QT)

A Paper On The Mathematics Of These Animations
A Description of the TEAL/Studio Project at MIT (pdf file)

Michael Faraday was the first to realize that the shape of electromagnetic field lines is extraordinarily expressive of their dynamical effects. We can understand intuitively many things about the forces transmitted by the fields by looking at the topology of the field lines. This is especially true when the field lines are animated. The examples given here are only a few of many (if you do not have a movie player, download QuickTime 3 to view both avi and quicktime files)

Experiments and Animations:

Faraday's Law
Electrostatics
Radiation
Magnetostatics
Java Applets of Interest (David Northridge, Developer)

Physics and mathematics by Professors John Belcher and Stanislaw Olbert. 3D modeling/animations and Physics demonstrations by Mark Bessette. MAX scripting by Larry Minton.

A poster presented at the January 1999 AAPT Meeting explains some of the pedagogy, mathematics, and physics of this effort. This file is in pdf format and is 300K in size.

Comments to jwb@space.mit.edu.


Faraday's Law

Magnet Moving In And Out Of A Coil Of Wire
Magnet Falling Through A Ring With Non-zero Resistance
Magnet Levitating Above A Ring or Disk With Zero Resistance
Magnet Suspended Below A Ring With Zero Resistance
Magnet Falling Through A Ring With Zero Resistance

To Contents


Electrostatics

Point Charge Attracted To Charged Sphere
Point Charge Repelled By A Charged Sphere

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Radiation

Magnetic Dipole Radiation From a Dipole That Turns On
Magnetic Dipole Radiation From a Dipole That Turns Off
Magnetic Dipole Radiation From A Sinusoidally Varying Dipole--The Near/Transition Zone
Magnetic Dipole Radiation From A Sinusoidally Varying Dipole--The Transition/Far Zone

To Contents


Magnetostatics

Magnetic Dipole Oscillating In A Background Field

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Copyright © 1999 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.

Last Updated May 2000.