Dr. John Eric Goff

	Associate Professor of Physics Physics Program Coordinator Address: School of Sciences Lynchburg College 1501 Lakeside Drive Lynchburg, Virginia 24501-3113 Office Location: Hobbs 412 Office Phone: (434) 544-8856 FAX: (434) 544-8646 e-mail: goff@lynchburg.edu
Spring 2008 Schedule

Short Bio

I am in my sixth year in the physics program at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia, as well as my fifth year as Program Coordinator for physics. Before coming to LC, I spent the 2000-2002 academic years as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Oberlin College located in Oberlin, Ohio. Before arriving at Oberlin, I spent the 1999-2000 academic year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. My graduate work was done at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana while my undergraduate days were spent at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. I was born in Charleston, West Virginia and spent most of my first seventeen years in West Virginia before my family moved to Nashville for my senior year of high school. As for hobbies, I love playing and watching sports, and I love playing bridge. I am married to a wonderful woman by the name of Susan Jevitt whose corporation, Jevitt Translations, Inc., specializes in professional translation from Japanese to English.

(Click here for a pdf version of my CV. Don't have a pdf viewer? Get a free one here. )

Spring 2008 Courses

Physics 162 - Physics II This course is a calculus-based introduction to physics and continues Physics 161 (Physics I). Students interested in majoring in physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science, or other sciences are likely to take this course. We concentrate mainly on electromagnetism and optics.

Physics 309 - Classical Mechanics This course is intended for physics majors and students interested in engineering. Others who wish a course that applies mathematics, specifically differential equations, to the natural world are encouraged to take this course. We cover Newtonian mechanics, the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian description of mechanics, and coupled oscillators.

Physics 333 - Computational Physics This is an upper-level course for physics majors. We analyze many problems from physics using a computer. We go through simple modeling, actual programming, and symbolic programming.

Recent Conferences, Workshops, and Short Courses

* Gave talk entitled Mathematica examples from the LC undergraduate physics curriculum at the Fall Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers held at Radford University in Radford, VA, November 2-3, 2007.  Click here for my PowerPoint presentation.

* Attended the Gordon Research Conference called Physics Research and Education held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, June 11-16, 2006. The focus of the conference was on electricity and magnetism. Click here for a conference photo (I am in the fourth row from the bottom, eighth over from the left.).

* Gave talk entitled Three-Year Study of Tour de France Modeling at the Fall Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers held at the American Center for Physics in College Park, MD, November 4-5, 2005.  Click here for my PowerPoint presentation.

* Attended the Gordon Research Conference called Nonlinear Science held at Colby College in Waterville, ME. The conference was held June 26 - July 1, 2005 and brought together the world's leading experts in nonlinear science. Click here for a conference photo (To find me, begin at the bottom right. Count four heads to the left and then four going back.).

* Attended the Activity Based Physics Faculty Institutes workshop at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. The workshop was held June 19-24, 2005 and focused on introductory physics teaching. Click here for a photo of the workshop group (I am on the far right of the back row.).

* I arranged for Lynchburg College to host the 2005 Spring Meeting of the Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The meeting was held March 11-12, 2005; meeting details can be found here. I gave a talk entitled Modern Application for Introductory Physics: Bloodstain Pattern Analysis. Click here for my PowerPoint presentation. Click here for a photo of me giving my talk and here for second photo.

* Gave talk entitled Check on Model Robustness: 2004 Tour de France at the Fall Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers held at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, VA, November 5-6, 2004. My talk won the Frank R. Haig Prize for best paper from a four-year college. Click here for my PowerPoint presentation. The final two slides of the presentation are PDF files showing tables of results. Click here for the first and here for the second.

* Attended the Computational Physics for Physics Educators workshop held at Centenary College in Hackettstown, NJ, July 11-17, 2004. The workshop was run by the National Computational Science Institute and focused on the use of computational techniques in physics education.

* Attended the Gordon Research Conference called Physics Research and Education held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA, June 13-18, 2004. The focus of the conference was on classical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. Click here for a conference photo (I am in the fifth row from the bottom, seventh over from the left.).

* Completed the National Science Foundation Chautauqua Short Course "Data Analysis and Visualization Using Mathematica" held at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN, May 16-18, 2004.

* Gave talk entitled Model of the 2003 Tour de France at the Spring Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers held at the National Science Foundation as part of the Washington Academy of Sciences Capital Science 2004, March 20-21, 2004. My talk won the Frank R. Haig Prize for best paper from a four-year college. Click here for my PowerPoint presentation. I got to meet and chat briefly with President Bush's science advisor, Dr. John Marburger, III. He serves as Director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Click here for a photo of Dr. Marburger talking to conference participants; I am on the far right waiting to introduce myself.

* Completed the National Science Foundation Chautauqua Short Course "The History and Future of Aeronautics" held at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in Edwards, CA, June 11-13, 2003. Click here for a picture of my Chautauqua class (I am the second from the left.).

* Attended the Workshop for New Physics and Astronomy Faculty held at the American Center for Physics in College Park, MD, November 7-10, 2002.

* Attended the Workshop on Opportunities in Materials Theory held jointly at the National Science Foundation and Georgetown University, October 14-16, 2002.

* Gave talk entitled A FUN General Education Course: Physics of Sports at the Fall Chesapeake Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers held at Radford University, October 4-5, 2002. My talk won the Frank R. Haig Prize for best paper from a four-year college. Click here for a picture of me giving my talk. Click here for a picture of me receiving the best paper award. Click here for my PowerPoint presentation.

My current research work is in a couple of areas. I have an interest in the physics of sports. Brandon Cook, who graduated from Lynchburg College in May of 2007, worked with me on a project that involved determining rules of thumb for successful soccer kicks.  We examined the free kick and the corner kick.  During the summer of 2007, LC physics major Crystal Moorman worked with me on a project dealing with computational gravity.  Before the summer got going, we published a paper which dealt with the golden ratio in a coupled-oscillator system.

During the summers of 2003 and 2004, I worked with Benjamin Lee Hannas (LC '03) on a model that predicts stage-winning times in the Tour de France. Our models did quite well; we missed the overall time in 2003 by just 0.03% and the overall time in 2004 by just 0.05%. Our Tour de France work was recently the subject of a newspaper article that appeared in the July 14, 2005 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  Click here for a copy of the article.

I have also studied drag forces on objects like spheres and baseballs. As a long-term project, I am slowly learning what is called the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. FDTD is a popular method in computational electrodynamics.

Publications since coming to Lynchburg College:

• Golden ratio in a coupled-oscillator problem, Crystal M. Moorman and John Eric Goff, European Journal of Physics 28 (5), 897-902 (2007).  (PDF version)
• Parameter space for successful soccer kicks, Brandon G. Cook and John Eric Goff, European Journal of Physics 27 (4), 865-874 (2006). (PDF version)
• Inclined-plane model of the 2004 Tour de France, Benjamin Lee Hannas and John Eric Goff, European Journal of Physics 26 (2), 251-259 (2005). (PDF version)
• Heuristic model of air drag on a sphere, John Eric Goff, Physics Education 39 (6), 496-499 (2004). (PDF version)
• Turning Around Newton's Second Law, John Eric Goff, The Science Education Review 3 (3), 97-102 (2004). (PDF version)
• Model of the 2003 Tour de France, Benjamin Lee Hannas and John Eric Goff, American Journal of Physics 72 (5), 575-579 (2004). (PDF version)
• A Fun General Education Physics Course: Physics of Sports, John Eric Goff, The Physics Teacher 42 (5), 280-283 (2004). (PDF version)

My thesis research at Indiana created a theory for the photon-drag effect in simple metals. Under the direction my advisor, Bill Schaich, my work represented the first fully quantum-mechanical calculation of the static second-order surface response. Now, what is photon drag? Well, when light hits a metal, some of the light's momentum is transferred to the metal upon reflection. Free electrons pick up that momentum ("dragged" by the light) and currents are established parallel to the metal's surface. The light cannot go too far into the metal, so the electrons are only pushed a little ways perpendicular to the surface (That leads to a voltage.).

Publications of thesis work at Indiana University:

• Theory of the photon-drag effect in simple metals, John Eric Goff and W. L. Schaich, Physical Review B 61 (15), 10471-10477 (2000). (PDF version)
• Hydrodynamics theory of photon drag, John Eric Goff and W. L. Schaich, Physical Review B 56 (23), 15421-15430 (1997). (PDF version)