Speaker
Description
I will present an overview of an interactive electronic textbook I have developed on Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Based on an original PDF text by my late colleague Prof. Rexford Adelberger, I have expanded his content into a 14-chapter Jupyter Book that walks the reader through four vectors, Lorentz Transformations, and spacetime diagrams, all the way through relativistic dynamics, electromagnetism, and a brief introduction to the ideas of General Relativity. I use Python to create interactive animated illustrations that allow the user to change such parameters as the relative speed between reference frames and see how the system responds. I have used this textbook in two classes so far (Fall 23 and 24) at the sophomore level. I will show examples of how the book works and share student reactions. In closing, I will preview my intentions to add a second volume on particle physics, using a discovery-based approach that will allow the reader to follow in the footsteps of 20th Century Physics to develop the Standard Model. Together, these two volumes will make a textbook for an Introduction to Modern Physics course.
