3. Preface from the editor

Demonstrations never got the attention they deserve in my physics classroom. That was until I started working on the ShowdeFysica books. There were just so many lovely, inspiring and educational demonstrations - made by my fellow authors - that I could use in my own lessons, I got hooked up. It is for good reason that the three volumes of ShowdeFysica are treasured in the Netherlands.

As team of authors, we always believed that these demonstrations well suit a wider audience than the physics teachers from the Netherlands and Vlaanderen. With the completion of the translation of a selection of about 1/3 of the original demonstrations, we finally reach this goal. It has been a tremendous job to translate these demos, and make these fit the online book format. That is, we had to redo several demos, video recording these so small clips could be include and include online (for instance) Python simulations as done in this demo about radioactive decay. Moreover, we did our best to even lower the bar to do a full data-analysis using Python, for instance in this demo about determining \(g\).

We hope that this book may serve as a source of inspiration and captivates you just as it has each member of the author team.

Freek Pols (editor)
2024 - 07 - 15

Fig. 3.1 Norbert (left) and Freek (on table) at a workshop on physics demonstrations.