I love Lego. Always have. I remember having a big bright red box containing hundreds of pieces when I was younger of varying colours and shapes. With its simple (yet indestructible) design, Lego is a fantastic children’s toy for promoting curiosity in developing years. But it turns out, Lego has some cool properties which interests physicists (and sometimes the odd chemist) even today.
I’ve always loved to play RollerCoaster Tycoon. The basic game play involves being able to design and run your own theme park, controlling elements such as park, ride and merchandise prices, what roller coasters are available, theme park design and layout, and more.
I’m a little late off the block with this one, but it’s something I heard about through the Physics World podcast a little while ago. To give some context, the Breakthrough prize (worth $3m) was recently awarded to 3 physicists for their work on “supergravity”.
Supergravity attempts to unify all of physics by introducing a graviton, a spin-2 particle which would help combine the theory of relativity with super symmetry through all of space-time. Needless to say, it if were correct, it would be a huge leap for physics. The issue? It has never been proven. Despite all its potential, the lack of experimental proof from the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) casts doubt upon the theory.
So when the breakthrough prize was awarded to the 3 physicists- Sergio Ferrara (CERN), Daniel Freedman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen (Stanford)- there was undoubtedly going to be some controversy over it. Should the breakthrough prize be given to unproven physics?
On one hand, no. Physics is a field of research and careful experiments. Experimental data must support a theory for the theory to be accepted as true, or else the theory is nothing more than a wild guess or speculation. The lack of proof to support supergravity reduces it to a guess. A very mathematical guess, but a guess none the less. Giving such a large and important prize for something that looks nice but has no practical use, as as commented by others, sends out the wrong idea, that the breakthrough prize is awarded for popular ideas than correct ideas. In the long run, this may push physicists into creating wild speculation rather than focusing on proven, albeit less “interesting”, physics.
On the other hand yes. The work these 3 physicists did was pioneering, and a brillinat display of maths. Despite being unproven, the theory opens up new ways of thinking. The first steps towards forming a correct (or more accurate theory) begins with the ground work being laid out first, and then other physicists taking those ideas and developing them further, increasing the potential for the formation of new, more accurate theories in the future. The work on supergravity may be something that is important to physics in the long run as opposed to something that can be proven exactly correct or proven immediately.
I personally think supergravity deserved to be awarded the breakthrough prize. For physics which demands rigorous experimental proof, the Nobel prize already exists. The breakthrough prize, I believe, exists to reward physicists who work on research that may fall outside the Nobel prize region and otherwise would not receive as much acknowledgement as it should.
Boomerangs are pretty cool, you throw them and by some genius of physics, they come back. I remember seeing them during my childhood when I lived in Australia and generally when people think of Australia, boomerangs and kangaroos are among the first things thought of. So how do return boomerangs work?
Continue reading “A look at the physics behind a boomerang’s ability to fly and return”From the 5th to the 8th of August I was up in Manchester learning about Nuclear Engineering on an Arkwright run course for Arkwright Engineers.
We kick started the week in our teams first discussing our preconceptions about nuclear engineering, then moving onto what we believe the benefits and dangers are. After the discussion, we had a professional in the industry come talk with us, telling us what we were correct about and what misconceptions we might have.
We then looked at the nuclear fuel cycle and how energy is made from uranium. The fuel cycle goes from obtaining unprocessed uranium from the ground, to its use in fuel fabrication, to the reprocessing of spent fuel (vitrification) and fuel disposal.
Continue reading “Nuclear Physics Week at the University of Manchester”
Last week (1st- 4th of July) I attended the Senior Physics Challenge boot camp held at Churchill college, Cambridge. 41 attendees were selected due to high performance in the Senior Physics Challenge (which ran from the end of last year to April this year) in which students answer questions of varying difficulty across different areas of physics including mechanics, waves, fields and circuits. The Senior Physics Challenge (SPC) bootcamp looked at an introduction to quantum mechanics. Throughout the week we had lectures in the Pippard lecture theatre held by Professor Mark Warner and solved problems from the Cavendish Quantum Mechanics Primer (co-written by Professor Warner).
Continue reading “Isaac Physics Senior Physics Challenge”
This is part 3 of the four part summary of Richard Feynman’s lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics. This lecture focuses on describing the transmission and reflection of photons, as well as providing an introduction to his famous Feynman Diagrams which describe how subatomic particles (e.g. electrons, protons, neutrons) interact.
This lecture also includes a basic introduction to his famous Feynman diagrams and the underlying principles to understand them.
In the last lecture, Feynman introduced us to calculating the probability of compound events, that is events with multiple steps. Following on from that, Feynman presents us with the following rules for our calculations:
Continue reading “A look at Richard Feynman’s QED Lectures: Part 3”Welcome back! This next lecture is focusing heavily on photons, the packets of light, and the how to calculate probabilities. Both of these were mentioned in Part 1, but in this lecture Feynman goes much more into depth as well as introducing interference.
Feynman sets up this lecture with a diagram: a source, S, is pointed at an angle at a horizontal reflective surface. Horizontally across from the source is a photomultiplier, P, with a block between S and P to stop photons directly travelling to P without reflecting. Given I’ve described the situation correct, you should have a mental image something like this (minus the lines):
The lines represent the different paths a photon from S could take to get to P. While we might normally expect one line going to the middle of the reflective surface at G so as to obey the rule that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, instead there are many different lines. And these lines seem counter-intuitive. Why would a photon go backwards to hit the reflective surface at A, meaning it has to travel even further to get to P?
Continue reading “A Look at Richard Feynman’s QED Lectures: Part 2”A short introduction to QED
QED stands for Quantum Electrodynamics, the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics- in short, it describes how light and matter interact.
QED was worked on by many scientists including British scientist Paul Dirac, Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman who ultimately came up with Feynman diagrams in 1948 to represent the behaviour of subatomic particles. Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga, jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for their work on QED.
In 1985, Feynman gave a series of four lectures on QED called “QED: The strange theory of light and matter”, the first of which I will be summarising below.
Continue reading “A Look at Richard Feynman’s QED Lectures: Part 1”Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
Marilyn Monroe
Yep, someone probably said it before her. And however questionable you find it, diamonds find themselves among the most expensive gemstones in the world, and it’s obvious why. With a low critical angle, light is totally internally reflected inside a diamond many times which is what gives diamonds their super sparky appearance. But how are jewellers able to identify between the real deal and the fakes?
Continue reading “How diamond’s properties can be used to differentiate it from fakes”
Distilled Thoughts 