Physics Education and Laboratory Techniques

Physics has been taught at the high school and college level primarily by the lecture method together with laboratory exercises aimed at verifying concepts taught in the lectures. These concepts are better understood when lectures are accompanied with demonstration, hand-on experiments, and questions that require students to ponder what will happen in an experiment and why. Students who participate in active learning, for example with hands-on experiments, learn through self-discovery. By trial and error, they learn to change their preconceptions about phenomena in physics and discover the underlying concepts.

Laboratory techniques are the sum of procedures used in natural sciences such as chemistry, biology, and physics to conduct experiments, all of which follow the scientific method. Some involve complex laboratory equipment from laboratory glassware to electrical devices, while others do not require such specific or expensive supplies.

Physics research presents a variety of technical situations involving a wide spectrum of potential hazards. Laboratory work may involve tasks that are potentially hazardous. An essential part of an engineering experiment is the presentation of fully analyzed results in the form of a well-prepared report for a client or prospective client. Your lab workbook, if well done, may be considered as the preliminary stage of such a report.

Since time is money, engineers plan to record, analyze, and display the results and conclusions of the experiment as immediately as possible. This immediate analysis and display has a second enormous virtue: it shows at once when an experiment is going wrong.

Designed for physics students treating the underlying basis for modern techniques and the devices used, this encyclopaedia covers the entire spectrum of laboratory physics and is a useful reference for all students and teachers.