Modelling, visualisation and demonstration are key strategies in physics research and in physics education. The UCT Physics Department owns a collection of research equipment and demonstration models –the latter purchased and/or constructed over the years by lecturers, technicians and student. Some are still functional and housed in the labs, others are stored in the educational demonstration storeroom and, older artefacts no longer in use, are housed in offices and cabinets through out the department, including some subsumed into the Curiosity cabinets.

The department hosts a website aimed at allowing easy archiving of and access by staff and students to the departments collection of demonstration models. It catalogues both lecture demonstrations and VPython scripts.

The lecture demos section contains descriptions of the setup and execution of various physics experiments, along with screenshots and a reference for finding the equipment in the UCT Physics labs.

The VPython scripts section contains scripts that demonstrate various physics concepts.

Some examples:

Ultraviolet Lamp

Strain: Bologne Phials

Monkey & Hunter