LABWORK ANIMATING PHYSICS
seconds) highly stylized animations to use in my lectures / talks, and I found that they work well on social media too if accompanied by enough explanations to make them understandable( I think of my target audience as“ PhD students and passionate amateurs”). Finally, it is actually time to make one, which might take anywhere between minutes and days of work, depending on how ambitious your plans are, and how much you can use of your old animations. Not surprisingly, once you have developed a large library of animations things get much easier, so it is advisable to start small, with a simple and manageable one before building up to more complex stuff.
Figure 4. The Poincare section of a kicked rotor is complex, and the difference between the dynamics near an elliptical and a hyperbolic point definitively requires a good amount of explanation. Nothing here is self-explanatory, and wether one prefers to use a set of static images or a short animation, this should always be seen as an aid to the explanation, and not as a selfcontained object.
that you don’ t know how to use professional 3D software is largely irrelevant, as there is a very good chance the tool you commonly use to make your figures and / or analyse your data is perfectly able to create high quality animations. In practice, if you can create a set of figures you can put them together into a. gif file, which will play them one after the other, forming an animation. I have seen people use the most disparate software to create animation, from coding them in Python / Matlab / C, to the use of dedicated graphics software like Illustrator or Blender. It all depends on what you are already familiar with, and / or what you are interested in learning. The third step is to decide what style you want to use, and this decision will strongly depend on the first two steps. A 10-minutes long video to post on YouTube requires a very different approach than a 5 seconds animate. gif that will loop on your slides. And even within these two extremes there is a lot of scope to find the sweet spot between clarity, aesthetic, complexity, and time needed to actually make the animation that suits you best. I personally like to make short( 10-15
REFERENCES
Conclusions
It goes without saying, but there are not many extrinsic motivations to make scientific animations. You are very unlikely to gain fame and riches making them, and while I am sure there are a few people who managed to make it into a job, chances are that it will never go beyond the level of a hobby( albeit a genuinely fun hobby). Making animations is a surprisingly engaging process in and of itself, with the added benefit that in many cases it will put to a test how much you truly understand the science you are trying to animate. And even if you don’ t want to make animations, there are plenty out there you can use for your lectures or talks. Just make sure about their copyright status before using them. If you can’ t find anything, assume that the animation you found online is the intellectual property of its creator. Which doesn’ t mean you can’ t use them, but it means you should ask the creator for permission. Most of the time they will be very happy you asked.
[ 1 ] G. Galilei Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, 2 nd edition( University of California Press, 1967).
[ 2 ] https:// tug. ctan. org / macros / latex / contrib / animate / animate. pdf
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