physics ups and downs...

Two times in the past week, I've come across what I regard as confusing statements about the precise definition of the word "heat". Probably nothing that would interest any of you readers, but given that I'm about to start my thermodynamics unit, it was bothering me that these precise definitions conflicted slightly with what I tell my liberal art students. Well, a little research later, and it turns out that I've been telling a tiny bit of a lie to my students for several years. It's nothing major, but it's really fucking with my head. How can I have taken four semesters of undergraduate and graduate thermodynamics and still be carrying around misapprehensions about such a fundamental definition? Totally fucked up.

In other news, I made a two-minute long movie today about Einstein's Equivalence Principle. It required me to film footage inside of the elevator at school. Standing in an elevator with a video camera and a tripod violates all sorts of social contracts, and people feel the need to ask you what you are doing in order to alleviate their discomfort. The problem is, while I can explain the equivalence principle in a 2-minute movie, I can't do it in a 4-story elevator ride. I eventually settled on the mysterious sounding "Physics experiment..." non-explanation. The word "physics" generally shuts people right up.

Anyway, I need to finish editing it, then I'll post it to the YouTubes.