Violins and Pipe Organs

I gave the Physics 140 lecture today, since both Prof. Greene and Prof. DeMarco were out of town. It was the music lecture, specifically concerned with vibrating strings and air columns. Everything went well, except that the Line of Fire didn't really cooperate. The flames kept getting blown out while I was trying to get a good standing wave. I'd never realized how difficult that demo was to do without any help. When I described the line of fire demo to Prof. DeMarco he immediately decided that we needed an excuse to use it in every single lecture. The students favorite demos seemed to be the pyrophone and the tacoma narrows bridge video.

At the end of the lecture I showed the first half of Disney's Donald in Mathemagicland. Which talks about how Pythagoras developed the structure of musical chords. A surprising number of students were willing to stay late to watch it.

-Tim