Physics articles

About me

My name is Cleon Teunissen, as you can see from the .nl top domain name I'm from the Netherlands. My first name is pronounced as you read it, but the vowel 'eu' in my surname doesn't exist in English. Pronouncing my surname as 'Tennyson' is as close as it's gonna get. (Pronouncing the 'eu' in 'Teunissen' as the 'Eu' in 'Europe' sounds really really bad.).

The domain name of this site is a contraction of my first name and the second syllable of my surname. The domain name is also chosen to be somewhat similar to the name 'Coriolis'. When I set up this site my purpose was to focus on the physics of rotation, and specifically the Coriolis effect.

As you can tell from my material I have a physics background, and I love physics as much as ever, but I'm currently not employed as a physicist.

About the articles

Some articles depend on concepts introduced in an earlier article. Not surprisingly, the article about the general theory of relativity relies on the reader being comfortable with the content of the article about the special theory of relativity.

In the section with articles that involve exclusively Newtonian dynamics the Eötvös effect article and the rotational-vibrational coupling article come first. The article 'inertial oscillations' relies on concepts discussed in those two articles.

As the number of articles grows, I will probably add a diagram with a dependency-tree.

Coriolis effect

The common theme of the articles in the Newtonian dynamics section is that they involve dynamics that in one form or another is referred to as examples of the Coriolis effect.

My goal is to provide a comprehensive set of articles in which all the different forms that are referred to as 'Coriolis effect' are discussed. Still to do (as of this writing), an article about Taylor columns (fluid dynamics).

Animations

I use lots of animations in my articles. The animations perform the job that would otherwise be performed by mathematical formulas.

Because the animations are so important, in some of the articles the animations are available in two sizes, 256 pixels wide and 512 pixels wide. The link to switch all images from one size to the other is in the upper left corner of each page.

All animations were manufactured by me. All content on this site that was manufactured by me is released under a Creative Commons license. In short, that means that others can use it for work of their own, provided that in turn they release under the same conditions, and that I get mentioned as the original author.

Unfortunately Microsoft Internet Explorer has very poor performance in displaying the GIF-animations in the articles. The internet browser Firefox has no problems displaying the animations on a 300 MHz PC with a 4MB Graphics card. Modern equipment may be fast enough to compensate for the dreadfully slow Internet Explorer processing. Anyway, the animations are smooth; if they appear to be jerky then it's a flaw in the displaying software.

For making the animations I used a range of software, with the demands of the animation determining the choice of software. The main tools I used:

Irfanview.	Very helpful for previewing the images for an animation in succession and in particular I used the batch processing capability of Irfanview, for instance to add a white border to 60 images in one go.
Graph	for 2D animations that involve just simple shapes. Graph is wonderful; it's capable, small, and uncluttered.
Imagemagick	I've used it for batch processing. I've used the command 'composite', and I think that's the only Imagemagick command I've used so far.
POV-ray	For 3D images and 3D animations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.