Making The Abstract Visible – Momentum

Quick blog.

Physics quantities are horribly (wonderfully) abstract: energy, forces, momentum…. If you could visualise them, they’d be easier to teach.

There have been occasional flurries of bar-model posts and tweets about bar-models across twitter (my go-to representation – see my posts here, here and here).

Bar models are great for representing some abstract concepts in physics, but it’s a struggle to represent 2 variable quantities such as power and momentum. It’s even trickier with negative quantities.

Until now (or last September anyway) when James de Winter forwarded me this link

which I’ve simplified to:

Over the past week or so I’ve been developing this handout for momentum (untested in the field).

Visible Momentum Workbook 9March19

I’d welcome feedback.

Ben