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”Moving into my final A Level year of chemistry, my class has started to cover optical isomerism. Part way through the lesson the teacher mentioned, as a side note, Turin and his work on explaining why we smell what we smell. I thought this sounded interesting and I’ve recently spent some time looking a little more into his work.
Luca Turin is a biophysicist and is well known for his work on the vibrational theory. His book, The Secret of Scent, details Turin’s work on perfumes, from his own history to his vibration theory about how we, as humans, smell. He has worked in academia for many years, working at University College London (UCL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and most recently in the neurobiology division at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center (BSRC) Alexander Fleming.
There are two common theories which both attempt to explain why things smell the way they do: the vibration theory of olfaction (by Turin), and the shape (docking) theory of olfaction. Below, I will look into both of them, the basic principles, evidence for both theories and issues with each theory.
Continue reading “Theories of our sense of smell- a look at the docking theory and Turin’s vibrational theory”
During the summer holiday, as an Arkwright Engineering Scholarship opportunity I got to visit the Dyson factory in a small town called Malmesbury (near Bath/Bristol). Aside from a tour around the factory, I learnt about the Dyson Institute which I had previously never come across.
The Dyson Institute offers a four year degree-apprenticeship for students interested in studying engineering. Half the week is spent studying engineering from lectures from the University of Warwick and half the week in spent working at Dyson. In years 3 and 4 students can specialise in mechanical engineering, electronics, software, or electromechanical engineering, and at the end of the 4 years, students come out with a bachelors degree in engineering from the University of Warwick.
Continue reading “Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology”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”Earlier this year I spotted the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (for Lower Sixth students studying chemistry at A Level) online, and I decided to ask my chemistry teacher to enter myself and few other fellow students who wanted to give it a try.
The Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (C3L6) is a 90 minute long paper filled with questions around AS level but designed to stretch students by asking questions in ways students haven’t seen before or going beyond the normal curriculum. The paper is split into two sections: organic and inorganic with there being (normally) 3 questions with many different parts (going up to part i and part j sometimes!). I did find this a bit frustrating sometimes when not being able to get one part of the question meant you couldn’t answer following parts.
Despite being tricky, I found the questions more interesting and engaging than ordinary A Level questions in the way they got you to think about things in different ways. I especially like how they give a lot of background to questions- this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of the periodic table so many of the questions were based around Mendeleev. This is important to helping students develop an understanding about the importance, practical uses, and even some of the history of chemistry.
In the end I managed to get a silver award! I think that C3L6 is a great opportunity and I’m fully planning to promote it to the aspiring chemists in the year below.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, check out some of my other posts:
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”
I’ve had an allotment for a couple of years now. Throughout the year, my family and I grow a variety of plants, including potatoes, peas, beans and carrots- the usual. Every year we sow and water the seeds, and the plants grow. And every year comes the same problem anyone trying to grow anything has had since the dawn of agriculture: bugs. So, to deal with this, mankind invented pesticides. But issues with pesticides creates demand for more natural solutions- could coffee be one?
Continue reading “Pesticides: the potential usage of coffee as an insect repellent”
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”
Distilled Thoughts 