In our physics course for liberal-arts students, “Galileo to Newton and Beyond,” students read literature of the period and do many experiments that relate directly to the history of physics. One such experiment concerns instantaneous impulses, where we extend Newton’s instantaneous-impulse method of orbital analysis to a graphical method of orbit determination. We have found that this experiment does a good job of teaching both horizontal projectile motion and instantaneous impulse.
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© 2000 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2000
American Association of Physics Teachers
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