In this course you will learn about:
As a student, you'll encounter vast amounts of information. Beyond academic material, you must process and interpret news, instructions, communications, and a wealth of other data. You'll also need to separate fact from opinion, and understand the quality of sources. The stronger your reading capabilities, the more efficiently and effectively you can turn information into knowledge.
There are many different processes and phenomena that emit electromagnetic radiation. Humans have taken advantage of many of these processes to develop technologies that use electromagnetic radiation.
Scalars and vectors are two kinds of quantities that are used in physics and math. Scalars are quantities that only have magnitude (or size), while vectors have both magnitude and direction. Explore some examples of scalars and vectors, including distance, displacement, speed, and velocity.
Video 1: The meaning of percent
Video 2: Meaning of 109%
Online activity 1: Percents
Video 3: Percents from fraction models
Online activity 2: Percents from fraction models
An overview of what physics is about as we delve deeper in future videos. How physics is related to math, the other sciences, and the world around us.
The beauty of a coral reef, the warm radiance of sunshine, the sting of sunburn, the X-ray revealing a broken bone, even microwave popcorn—all are brought to us by electromagnetic waves. The list of the various types of electromagnetic waves, ranging from radio transmission waves to nuclear gamma-ray (γ-ray) emissions, is interesting in itself.
Even more intriguing is that all of these different phenomena are manifestations of the same thing—electromagnetic waves (see Figure 15.1). What are electromagnetic waves? How are they created, and how do they travel? How can we understand their widely varying properties? What is the relationship between electric and magnetic effects? These and other questions will be explored.
An image that illustrates light reflecting off a plain mirror.
Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.
