Why It Matters
Every passage below tells a true story — a rocket sled, a satellite, a boxing glove, a pair of headphones — and uses it to explain the physics underneath. Pick a topic to find the passages, then open one straight from Google Docs or Word.
1D Motion
2 reading passages — falling, drag, and terminal velocity through a skydiver's jump, and how Galileo used a tilted ramp and a row of bells to prove gravity accelerates objects at a constant rate.
2D Motion
2 reading passages — how uniform circular motion lets a satellite hover over the same spot on Earth for years, and Newton's cannonball thought experiment that revealed orbits as continuous falling.
Dynamics
7 reading passages — Newton's Laws at work in a Gravitron ride, a seatbelt, a boxing glove, a rocket sled, and a truck-and-car collision, the real difference between a scientific law and a scientific theory, and the Newton-Hooke rivalry that modeled how to challenge a scientific claim.
Waves
2 reading passages — the Doppler effect inside a weather radar dome and the superposition trick behind noise-canceling headphones.
Energy
2 reading passages — the story of James Prescott Joule and William Thomson testing, on a honeymoon in the French Alps, whether heat is motion rather than a fluid, and six turning points in science, from a 132 CE earthquake detector to Foucault's proof that Earth rotates, all powered by a simple swinging weight.
Circular Motion
1 reading passage — how one physics idea, gravity supplying centripetal force, powers everything from GPS to hurricane forecasts to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Electricity & Magnetism
3 reading passages — how Benjamin Franklin became the world's most famous scientist and coined the language of electricity, how lodestones, William Gilbert, and Hans Christian Oersted slowly uncovered the hidden link between magnetism and electric current, and how Nikola Tesla's alternating current beat Thomas Edison's direct current in the "War of the Currents" that built the modern power grid.
Modern Physics
1 reading passage — how Marie Curie's discovery of radioactivity cracked open the atom itself, from the mysterious glow of pitchblende to the mobile X-ray units she built to save soldiers' lives in WWI.