Stephen Hawking's Snapshots of the Universe ($1.99) is an interactive educational iPad app that demonstrates, using a series of games or exercises, some of the physical principles that govern our universe. Augmented with text and videos, Snapshots provides a decent introduction to some key concepts in both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. It's a good resource for secondary-school physics students, and anyone who wants to better understand physics.
The material in the app is covered in Hawking's books, A Brief History of Time and A Briefer History of Time, both published by Random House, the creators of the app. The text sections of the app include links to buy the books, as well as buttons to share the app's content via email, Twitter, and Facebook. Snapshots is an iPad-only app. I tested it using an iPad Air 2 running iOS 8.3.
Sections in Snapshots include Building a Solar System, Gravity and Acceleration, Twins Paradox, The Relativity of Motion, Drop it, Galileo!, Einstein's Warped Worldview, Black Holes Ain't So Black, and Your Place in the Universe. Two additional sections, Evolution of a Star and Earth to Mars, are available through a single $0.99 in-app purchase.
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Physics Games
Each exercise (or experiment, as the app calls them) focuses on a different physical principle. While some of the exercises worked smoothly in my testing, others were trickier and frustrating to try to operate. For example in Building a Solar System, you set planets into motion around a star. To launch a planet, you drag the planet from a sidebar and place it on the screen, and then you pull it in the direction opposite that in which you want to go. You'll see a line composed of arrows showing its presumed trajectory. You can alter the planet's path by changing how far you pull it, and in what direction relative to where you originally placed it.
In this respect, it's very similar to Angry Birds Space, a game that's been lauded for the accuracy of some of its physics. But while one can aim a bird very precisely in Angry Birds: Space, it's a lot harder to aim a planet in Snapshots, as they don't seem to quite follow their intended orbits for long, in relation to both the arrows and the concentric rings that mark the planets' orbits.
Mutual Attraction
One of my favorite parts of Snapshots can be found in the Gravity and Acceleration section (with the teaser "Did the apple hit Newton, or did Newton hit the apple?"). Along with the explanatory part of the section is a video about gravity that Hawking narrates and appears in. While sitting beneath an apple tree, he talks about how Sir Isaac Newton—who held the same professorship at Cambridge as Hawking has now—formulated his theory of gravity after supposedly being hit on the head with an apple. As Hawking talks, apples start falling off the tree around him, and although it's a veritable hailstorm of apples, none of them hit him. Toward the end of the video, he notes "…the apples are attracted to the Earth, and although you can't see it, the Earth moves slightly up toward the apples…."
The idea that the Earth is pulled ever-so-slightly toward the apples is one of several counterintuitive notions that Snapshots puts forward. In one exercise, in the section titled "The Relativity of Motion," you see a person walking, and you are asked to guess how fast they are traveling: 3mph or 63mph. No matter which you choose, you will be told that you're both right and wrong. The camera moves outward, and you see that the person is walking on top of a train. You are told "The person is moving at 3mph relative to the train, but at 63mph relative to the ground." The concept being conveyed is that all motion (or rest) is relative to something else, and how the motion is perceived depends on the vantage of the observer. Although the idea that there's no absolute standard of rest is an outgrowth of Newton's physics, Newton himself refused to accept it.
Other concepts in the app get even headier. The Twins Paradox section explores the concept that time will run more slowly for an observer in motion than one who is at rest. In the related exercise, you launch one twin on a round-trip space mission and set the ship's speed as a percentage of the speed of light, while the other twin stays on Earth. The faster the spaceship travels, the slower the astronaut twin will have aged relative to the twin who stayed at home.
Stephen Hawking's Snapshots of the Universe is an overview of some of the material in Dr. Hawking's books, and both the text and the exercises may help students to better understand some of the concepts, although some of the exercises can be frustrating. The app is a good choice for students and teachers, fans of Stephen Hawking, and anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge of physics.
Stephen Hawking's Snapshots of the Universe iPad app attempts to convey some heady physics concepts through explanations and exercises, and it is largely successful in that regard.
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