By Dave DeFusco
When physicists and engineers want to understand how stiff a material truly is, they turn to a measure called Young’s modulus—a number that captures how resistant a material is to stretching or bending. Steel, known for its strength and rigidity, has a very high Young’s modulus. Rubber, by contrast, bends and stretches with ease, and therefore has a much lower one.
An International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education paper, “Young’s Modulus from Experiments on Large Beam Deflections,” led by Fredy Zypman, corresponding author of the paper and professor of physics in the Katz School’s M.A. in Physics, takes a fresh look at how this important number is measured, and how it can sometimes be measured incorrectly.
Zypman designed the experiment to bring real-world industrial research into the classroom, giving students hands-on experience with the kinds of questions engineers face outside academia. He collaborated closely with Joshua Rodriguez, an adjunct professor and physics technician, who played a key role in collecting high-quality data.
What began as an industrial research question grew into a hands-on teaching module for physics students. The story started with a real-world problem. Researchers studying tiny metal wires, called nanowires, believed that the wires became softer when bent strongly. In other words, the wires appeared to lose stiffness under large stress.
The original analysis of the nanowire experiment used a standard beam-bending formula based on the Euler-Bernoulli theory. That theory works very well, but only when a beam bends a small amount. The nanowires, however, were bending a lot. The researchers wondered: Were the wires truly softening? Or was the mathematical modeling creating a false impression?
“That was the key question,” said Zypman. “If you use a formula outside of the conditions where it’s supposed to work, you can get answers that look real but are actually artifacts of the model.”
An artifact, in this case, means a misleading result caused by the method of analysis rather than by the material itself. Instead of working with nanowires and expensive microscopes, the researchers re-created the problem in a Yeshiva University teaching lab. They used a thin strip of tempered steel about 10 inches long and clamped at one end like a diving board. This setup is called a cantilever beam.
Weights were hung from the free end of the beam, up to 120 grams, or four ounces. A camera placed several meters away took detailed pictures of how the beam bent under each load. Students then analyzed the bending in two different ways: First, using the traditional Euler-Bernoulli theory, which assumes only small bending and, second, using a more complete theory called the Elastica, which works even when bending is large.
“The idea was to let students see what happens when you push a model beyond its limits,” said Zypman. “We wanted them to connect theory, experiment and computation, not just plug numbers into equations.”
Rodriguez captured science-grade photographs of the bending beam, carefully controlling the camera position and lighting to ensure precise measurements that students could confidently analyze, and the students extracted the shape of the bent beam from these photographs. Then they fitted the data to both theories to calculate Young’s modulus. When the team used the Elastica theory, they found that Young’s modulus stayed constant—exactly what physics predicts for steel bending within its elastic limit.
When they used Euler-Bernoulli theory, something strange happened. For small weights, the calculated Young’s modulus was correct. As the weights increased, however, the calculated stiffness appeared to decrease. In other words, the beam seemed to soften, even though it was still in its normal elastic range and had not changed at all. This showed clearly that the apparent softening was not real. It was an artifact caused by using the wrong mathematical model for large bending.
“The beam wasn’t changing,” said Zypman. “The analysis was.”
Zypman said the lesson goes far beyond this single experiment. “In engineering and physics, we rely heavily on published results,” he said, “but every published result is based on assumptions. If you don’t examine those assumptions carefully, you can be misled.”
The teaching module was built into a senior-level engineering course component called “Assessing Published Results.” Students were first asked to read a published paper and identify its assumptions. Then they performed their own experiment and compared their findings to the published claims. Zypman believes this kind of training is essential.
“Students need to learn that equations are not universal truths,” he said. “They are tools that work under specific conditions. Understanding the limits of those tools is part of thinking like a real physicist.”
The study concludes that using Euler-Bernoulli theory for large deflections can create the illusion of load-dependent softening. The more complete Elastica theory avoids this problem and gives the correct, constant value of Young’s modulus. This has important implications not only for classroom experiments, but also for advanced research, including the original nanowire question that inspired the project.
“The math you choose shapes the story your data tells,” said Zypman. “Our goal was to teach students how to question that story, and check whether it’s really true.”
