ANIMATING PHYSICS LABWORK
Animating Physics for Science Communication
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Jacopo BERTOLOTTI * Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4QL, UK * j. bertolotti @ exeter. ac. uk
If a figure is worth a thousand words, how many words is an animation worth? As it is often the case, the answer is a resounding“ it depends”, but nevertheless animations can be a very powerful tool to convey complex information in a fast and compact form. And, contrary to what you might think, creating an effective animation is not any more difficult than creating an effective figure.
https:// doi. org / 10.1051 / photon / 202513133
Conveying complex information is a task without a universal solution, and conveying science is no exception. We have a very long history of trying to explain each other counter-intuitive scientific ideas and some approaches stood the test of time better than other. The original explanation of what is now known as Galilean Invariance is roughly half a page of text involving a ship, flying insects, fishes, several buckets of water, and people jumping [ 1 ]. Would we explain it in the same way today? Surely my undergraduate classical mechanics textbook didn’ t, but my professor’ s explanation in class wasn’ t all that different from Galileo’ s one, albeit with far fewer
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