Optical Barrier Penetration

Abstract

Recently I took a walk through the physics demonstration room at Kenyon College, where I first started teaching in 1964. On an upper shelf was the little home-built apparatus in Fig. 1. This was used for one of two short single-concept films that I made in the 1970s. Both “The Magnus Effect” and “Optical Barrier Penetration” were part of the Film and Slide Repository of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Looking back, my colleague Franklin Miller (1912–2012), the developer of the single-concept film, and I, once the chair of the Visual Aids Committee of the AAPT, were both involved in this project.