This is an early site. Our animations have gotten much much MUCH better. Go to this link for our later material.

Animations created using Discreet's 3D Studio MAX.

This work is supported by NSF Grant #9950380, an MIT Class of 1960 Fellowship, The Helena Foundation, the MIT Classes of 51 and 55 Funds for Educational Excellence, the MIT School of Science Educational Initiative Awards, and MIT Academic Computing.

A Paper On The Mathematics Of These Animations
A Description of the TEAL/Studio Project at MIT (pdf file)

Michael Faraday was the first to realize that the shape of electromagnetic field lines is extraordinarily expressive of their dynamical effects. We can understand intuitively many things about the forces transmitted by the fields by looking at the topology of the field lines. This is especially true when the field lines are animated. The examples given here are only a few of many (if you do not have a movie player, download QuickTime 3 to view both avi and quicktime files)

Experiments and Animations:

A poster presented at the January 1999 AAPT Meeting explains some of the pedagogy, mathematics, and physics of this effort. This file is in pdf format and is 300K in size.

Comments to jwb@space.mit.edu.