"Rings of Current," MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives

"Trace," MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives

First runner-up in "Weird Fields" contest, by David Rush

Resonating Images

Through computer-generated visualizations of complex physical phenomena like electromagnetic force fields, the exhibition "Visualizing Physics: Technology-Enabled Active Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" (at the MIT Museum through June 5) follows the progression of the MIT undergraduate course "Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism."

John Belcher, a professor of physics at MIT, and his colleagues have developed a vector-field-mapping program that enables students to explore the relationship between mathematical functions and their visual representations, to prepare them to study electric and magnetic fields. Students enter their designs into a "Weird Fields" contest that takes place each semester.

The design below was created by David Rush, the first runner-up in the contest. The other two images show other visualizations for the course. The image at left is a snapshot in time of a simulation in which thousands of very light particles move through the electric field generated by 12 massive stationary charges. The top image shows the field of a permanent magnet suspended above a ring of current. More images are available at http://jlearn.mit.edu/museum_images/visphysics.htm