Physics Professor Don Smith says his interactive textbook will help students better understand special relativity theories.
Physics professor Don Smith will present his online book Aug. 5 in Washington D.C., at a national conference for physics educators.
"Being able to manipulate time and space yourself makes the concepts clearer than any textbook picture can."
A Guilford College Physics professor has transformed an orphaned manuscript by a late colleague into an interactive digital textbook that’s changing how his students experience Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
Raymond Binford Professor of Physics Don Smith recently completed Introduction to Modern Physics, a dynamic, web-based learning tool built upon a 50-page draft written in 2004 by the late Rex Adelberger. Rex, who taught Physics at Guilford for 35 years, retired in 2007 and died in 2018.
Don will present the digital textbook Aug. 4 at the national conference of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Washington D.C. “I’m excited to get feedback from others—and maybe learn about ways to publish,” he says.
Rex never intended his manuscript for formal publication. It was a rough yet thoughtful teaching aid, filled with handwritten edits, typos and simple graphs. “It wasn’t polished, but the ideas were there,” Don says. “I didn’t want to see his work go to waste.” After receiving the blessing of Rex’s widow, Pat, Don began rebuilding the material from the ground up.
What started with a single animated simulation of a beam-splitting interferometer soon evolved into a full-scale interactive textbook. “Most people look at a diagram of an interferometer and don’t get what’s going on,” Don explains. “So I animated it — light beams splitting, bouncing off mirrors, recombining, and producing interference patterns.”
He kept going — adding simulations, animated clocks and rulers to show time dilation, dynamic graphs of events in space and time, and interactive sliders to illustrate how the order of simultaneous events changes with relative motion.
“I ended up adding a lot,” Don says. “Every chapter now has illustrations and interactive examples.” Where Rex left off, Don picked up — layering modern visualizations onto complex theories to help students move beyond static diagrams and into immersive exploration.
He’s already used the digital book in several classes, and the results are promising.
“They’ve borne out my hope,” Don says. “Being able to manipulate time and space yourself makes the concepts clearer than any textbook picture can.”
The digital book is available online, but Don is eager to expand its reach. In the meantime, he’s inviting other Physics instructors and students to explore the project and share their feedback.