A Kitchen Course in Electricity and Magnetism

Part 1 HOME ELECTROSTATICS.- Background.- Kitchen experiments with static electricity.- Atoms.- Experiment: bending water.- Dipoles.- Experiment comb & paper.- Kitchen electroscope.- Experiments with the electroscope.- Storing charge.- Charging by inducing charges.- Conductors and insulators.- Lightning; Franklin s bells.- Airplane as a Faraday Cage.- Part 2 CURRENT & VOLTAGE.- Water analogy.- Galvani s frogs legs.- Amps, volts, energy, power.- Another way to get a voltage Seebeck Effect.- LEDs vs bulbs.- Making a simple current meter.- Ohm's law.- Experiment resistance of a household bulb.- Definition of power.- Lighting the LED.- Solar cells.- A charging circuit plain diode.- Brief history of electrical diodes.- Series and parallel, water analogy.- Automobile lighting.- AC & DC.- An AC experiment with LEDs.- Part 3 MAGNETISM.- Lodestones.- Further view of magnetism.- A kitchen compass .- Diamagnetism.- Oersted s experiment.- A coil.- Inductance.- A house alarm.- Force on a current (Lorentz force).- Adjacent currents.- Lorentz force with old TVs.- Hall effect.- Note on microwave ovens.- Relative motion of a magnet and a wire; Faraday s law.- A kitchen radio.- Experiment: falling magnet.- A household use of a moving magnet.- Part 4 TRANSISTORS.- Re-visit the diode.- The pn junction.- Experiment diode graph.- Note on flat screen TVs that display with diodes.- Comment on LCDs.- The transistor.- Experiment transistor as switch.- Resistor color code.- Experiment transistor as amplifier.

J. David Nightingale has taught physics for over 30 years at SUNY New Paltz. More recently he has been a regular essayist for Northeast Public Radio, authoring many essays on famous scientists from history. Prof. Nightingale has previously co-authored the Springer book "A Short Course in General Relativity", now in its third edition.