What follows is an alternative to the standard tuning fork and quarter-wave tube speed of sound experiment. Rather than adjusting the water level in a glass or plastic tube to vary the length of an air column, a set of resonance tubes of different lengths is used. The experiment still demonstrates the principles of standing waves in air columns and can also be used to study end-correction as well as determining the speed of sound in air. Experimenting with end-correction and the speed of sound

In his recent popular book The Universe in a Nutshell, Steven Hawking gives expressions for the entropy1 and temperature (often referred to as the “Hawking temperature”2 ) of a black hole:3 S = kc34ℏG A T = ℏc38πkGM, where A is the area of the event horizon, M is the mass, k is Boltzmann's constant, ℏ = h2π (h being Planck's constant), c is the speed of light, and G is the universal gravitational constant. These expressions can be used as starting points for some interesting approximations on the thermodynamics of a Schwarzschild black hole, of mass M, which by definition is nonrotating and spherical with an event horizon of radius R = 2GMc2.4,5

ABSTRACT

What follows is a description of the procedure for a directed-study in which a student, guided by a faculty member, attempted to identify potentially habitable exoplanets using actual data available online from NASA’s Kepler Mission.