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Princess Ana
Very true, and I know I felt the same, until I read a little on it in my spare time. At its simplest, it doesn't really need anything other than basic maths, and a lot of the conceptual stuff is very interesting, albeit wierd [although, if you really want some weird physics, quantum physics is also accessible (lots of pop. books out there), and very very strange].
Yeah I read lots of those before I went to university... quantum rules!
It helped me a lot with the real quantum I have to do now at uni.
One poppy book that I quite like is "In search of Schrodinger's Cats" by John Gribbin. But people tend to have a love hate relationship with it, a marmite of a book if you like.
Physics is a lot more readable than you might think. I remember even in my first year at uni I was quite intimidated by textbooks and quite unwilling to delve into higher level books. But I've learned they really are quite accessible if you take the time to understand them
. Speaking of SR, I read a book by French "Special relativity" (aptly named) that was pretty much the core text book for the first year, and it was perfectly readable. The great thing about SR is that the maths is very very simple. Really no more than A-level. The hard thing is the mindblowing concepts. That makes it much more accessible for A-level students. You can read a full uni text book and it make sense.
The same is true to some degree with quantum. You won't handle the maths, but the interesting bits, the concepts are very interesting. If you are thinking of taking physics you should definitely be reading some pop science books, apart from anything else to see if you like the subject! Its good for your PS statement, and very interesting.
Definitely don't be scared of books!
F1 fanatic
Ok so lets start off with a topic on the tip of a lot of tongues... LHC, the new, soon to be opened (hopefully) Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
It will be the worlds largest particle accelerator, costing a cool €2.9 billion! Quite a lot when you consider the lack of funding for fusion research!
So whats the point, well it will produce energies particles with energies of 14TeV, which is an equivalent energy to the rest mass of 2 million electrons!
Like most accelerators, it works on the principle of using the charge of a particle to accelerate it in an electromagnetic field. An electric field gives it the kick and the magnetic field keeps the particle in a circular orbit, a circular accelerator such as this means the particle can go round and round again building up more and more energy.
The magnets required to keep these particles in the circular orbit is huge. The more energy they have the larger the force needed to maintain the orbit. Now the magnetic field, the B-field, depends on the current and LHC will use a current of 13 000 amps.
Now we know that power is I^2*R... so imagine the heat dissipated in these things! The only way to remove it is through the use of liquid helium so the magnets are super-conducting. The result is a field of over 8 tesla. The highest non-electromagnet is about 1 tesla... the highest in schools about 0.1T.
Such is the energy of these beams of particles, that were they to touch the sides of the magnet they would burn right through. The solution is a method called quenching, whereby energy is distributed over the whole magnet rather than just at a single point and is then dissipated into huge resistors.
The final problem is how to get rid of this high energy beam when its been used. There will be 2 beam dumps, 600m in length will dissipate the beam energy in 7m of steel coated carbon.
So whats the whole point? The point is to hopefully discover the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle supposedly responsible for mass. Its predicted by theory but energies havent got high enough to see it.
The higher the energies the more we can probe into the past and simulate conditions from the early universe. Maybe even observing the unification of the strong and weak nuclear forces with gravity. There is also the possibility of calculating the mass of super-symmetric particles.
Right, I hope that has wet your whistle... comments, reactions, questions, additions... discuss...
It will be the worlds largest particle accelerator, costing a cool €2.9 billion! Quite a lot when you consider the lack of funding for fusion research!
So whats the point, well it will produce energies particles with energies of 14TeV, which is an equivalent energy to the rest mass of 2 million electrons!
Like most accelerators, it works on the principle of using the charge of a particle to accelerate it in an electromagnetic field. An electric field gives it the kick and the magnetic field keeps the particle in a circular orbit, a circular accelerator such as this means the particle can go round and round again building up more and more energy.
The magnets required to keep these particles in the circular orbit is huge. The more energy they have the larger the force needed to maintain the orbit. Now the magnetic field, the B-field, depends on the current and LHC will use a current of 13 000 amps.
Now we know that power is I^2*R... so imagine the heat dissipated in these things! The only way to remove it is through the use of liquid helium so the magnets are super-conducting. The result is a field of over 8 tesla. The highest non-electromagnet is about 1 tesla... the highest in schools about 0.1T.
Such is the energy of these beams of particles, that were they to touch the sides of the magnet they would burn right through. The solution is a method called quenching, whereby energy is distributed over the whole magnet rather than just at a single point and is then dissipated into huge resistors.
The final problem is how to get rid of this high energy beam when its been used. There will be 2 beam dumps, 600m in length will dissipate the beam energy in 7m of steel coated carbon.
So whats the whole point? The point is to hopefully discover the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle supposedly responsible for mass. Its predicted by theory but energies havent got high enough to see it.
The higher the energies the more we can probe into the past and simulate conditions from the early universe. Maybe even observing the unification of the strong and weak nuclear forces with gravity. There is also the possibility of calculating the mass of super-symmetric particles.
Right, I hope that has wet your whistle... comments, reactions, questions, additions... discuss...
Wow, interesting stuff
We've just been learning about particle accelerators for physics (A Level synoptic).. is the LHC like a cyclotron? I bet its more complicated than that
, but does it work on the same principle?F1 fanatic
So whats the whole point? The point is to hopefully discover the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle supposedly responsible for mass. Its predicted by theory but energies havent got high enough to see it.
Do they think the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of quarks? I thought quarks couldn't be split up any further
Ok so lets start off with a topic on the tip of a lot of tongues... LHC, the new, soon to be opened (hopefully) Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
It will be the worlds largest particle accelerator, costing a cool €2.9 billion! Quite a lot when you consider the lack of funding for fusion research!
So whats the point, well it will produce energies particles with energies of 14TeV, which is an equivalent energy to the rest mass of 2 million electrons!
Like most accelerators, it works on the principle of using the charge of a particle to accelerate it in an electromagnetic field. An electric field gives it the kick and the magnetic field keeps the particle in a circular orbit, a circular accelerator such as this means the particle can go round and round again building up more and more energy.
The magnets required to keep these particles in the circular orbit is huge. The more energy they have the larger the force needed to maintain the orbit. Now the magnetic field, the B-field, depends on the current and LHC will use a current of 13 000 amps.
Now we know that power is I^2*R... so imagine the heat dissipated in these things! The only way to remove it is through the use of liquid helium so the magnets are super-conducting. The result is a field of over 8 tesla. The highest non-electromagnet is about 1 tesla... the highest in schools about 0.1T.
Such is the energy of these beams of particles, that were they to touch the sides of the magnet they would burn right through. The solution is a method called quenching, whereby energy is distributed over the whole magnet rather than just at a single point and is then dissipated into huge resistors.
The final problem is how to get rid of this high energy beam when its been used. There will be 2 beam dumps, 600m in length will dissipate the beam energy in 7m of steel coated carbon.
So whats the whole point? The point is to hopefully discover the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle supposedly responsible for mass. Its predicted by theory but energies havent got high enough to see it.
The higher the energies the more we can probe into the past and simulate conditions from the early universe. Maybe even observing the unification of the strong and weak nuclear forces with gravity. There is also the possibility of calculating the mass of super-symmetric particles.
It will be the worlds largest particle accelerator, costing a cool €2.9 billion! Quite a lot when you consider the lack of funding for fusion research!
So whats the point, well it will produce energies particles with energies of 14TeV, which is an equivalent energy to the rest mass of 2 million electrons!
Like most accelerators, it works on the principle of using the charge of a particle to accelerate it in an electromagnetic field. An electric field gives it the kick and the magnetic field keeps the particle in a circular orbit, a circular accelerator such as this means the particle can go round and round again building up more and more energy.
The magnets required to keep these particles in the circular orbit is huge. The more energy they have the larger the force needed to maintain the orbit. Now the magnetic field, the B-field, depends on the current and LHC will use a current of 13 000 amps.
Now we know that power is I^2*R... so imagine the heat dissipated in these things! The only way to remove it is through the use of liquid helium so the magnets are super-conducting. The result is a field of over 8 tesla. The highest non-electromagnet is about 1 tesla... the highest in schools about 0.1T.
Such is the energy of these beams of particles, that were they to touch the sides of the magnet they would burn right through. The solution is a method called quenching, whereby energy is distributed over the whole magnet rather than just at a single point and is then dissipated into huge resistors.
The final problem is how to get rid of this high energy beam when its been used. There will be 2 beam dumps, 600m in length will dissipate the beam energy in 7m of steel coated carbon.
So whats the whole point? The point is to hopefully discover the Higgs boson, the sub-atomic particle supposedly responsible for mass. Its predicted by theory but energies havent got high enough to see it.
The higher the energies the more we can probe into the past and simulate conditions from the early universe. Maybe even observing the unification of the strong and weak nuclear forces with gravity. There is also the possibility of calculating the mass of super-symmetric particles.
So.. What type of particles do they intend to accelerate in the LHC?
ArVi
Wow, interesting stuff
We've just been learning about particle accelerators for physics (A Level synoptic).. is the LHC like a cyclotron? I bet its more complicated than that, but does it work on the same principle?
We've just been learning about particle accelerators for physics (A Level synoptic).. is the LHC like a cyclotron? I bet its more complicated than that
, but does it work on the same principle?Yes of a sort... its actually a type of accelerator called a synchrotron. Its slightly more advanced than a cyclotron. As I'm sure you have done in when you were looking at it, a cyclotron is made up of 2 metal D's, you apply a constant magnetic field and the electron goes in a circular orbit due to the Lorentz force:
F=q(vxB)
Across the D's you apply an electric potential difference and so every time the particles go round they get another kick and are accelerated. The problem is that as they go faster, the force provided above isn't enough, because it can't balance the centripetal force due to the rotational motion and the particle spirals outwards. That means you can only take it around so many times before it spirals out of the D's and so there is quite a small energy limit obtainable from a cyclotron of about 10MeV.
Now LHC is a rather advanced version of what is called a synchrotron. In a synchrotron the B-field varies, so that as the particle accelerates it varies just enough for the particle to be kept in a stable orbit and it can be accelerated to the limit of the B-field obtainable. This means that much higher energies can be obtained!
The other thing of note, is that relativity plays a role. You may know that as a particle speeds up its mass increases due to relativity. What this means is that it doesn't go as fast as would be expected and so the electric field which varies sinusoidally, becomes out of sync with the particle so that at the moment the particle crosses the gap in the cyclotron, the E-field isn't at its maximum value and can't get as big a kick. Eventually this gets so bad that there can be no further acceleration or addition of energy. The particle is out of phase with the field.
As the name suggests a synchrotron corrects this also, it works by using cavities, which are points at which the beam is accelerated, or given a kick, as in the cyclotron. Now the clever trick is something called phase stability. The particle will correct itself so that it stays in phase. If it was going too slowly, the phase difference between the particle and electric field is such that it gets a bigger kick, so by the time it reaches the next cavity it is back in phase. If the particle is going faster than it should it gets less energy from the field. All just a clever piece of engineering. Therefore, you get no change of phase and the particle can be accelerated happily right up to the limit of the field
.LHC is a little more complicated than that, because of the high energies involved, but it works on the same basic principle.
Hey! Great thread....
I am going to be applying later this year for Natural Sciences at uni and hope eventually to specialise in Astrophysics...I was wondering if anyone could recommend any interesting physics books (suitable for an A-level student)? I have heard that The New Quantum Universe is a good read but not sure how difficult it is.
Thanks for any recommendations.
I am going to be applying later this year for Natural Sciences at uni and hope eventually to specialise in Astrophysics...I was wondering if anyone could recommend any interesting physics books (suitable for an A-level student)? I have heard that The New Quantum Universe is a good read but not sure how difficult it is.
Thanks for any recommendations.
ArVi
Do they think the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of quarks? I thought quarks couldn't be split up any further
Yes the Higgs Boson is supposed to be the particle responsible for mass, in any particle not just hadrons and so on. You are right in that a quark can't be split up further. The strong nuclear force binding it is so great that the energy binding it is more than enough to produce another pair of quarks.
Bosons are slightly different though. Bosons are generally exchange particles. They act differently to other atoms and particles. They are often the particles which mediate force, the gluon is a boson, which represents the strong nuclear force, the photon is also a boson. As far as I know these do not need to be created rom quarks, its not a case of splitting the quark. You just collide two particles with huge energies, such high energies that you end up with huge numbers of new particles being created, even without the bits you break off the old ones. The problem up to now has been the absolutely huge amount of energy needed to isolate a higgs boson.
I have to say I don't know too much, as yet about particle physics. I don't do it until next year, so I can't really say much more than that. There is however, bound to be someone on here that does.
Remind me as a future topic of conversation to talk about exchange symmetry and fermions/ bosons... its a fascinating area.
AlphaX
Hey! Great thread....
I am going to be applying later this year for Natural Sciences at uni and hope eventually to specialise in Astrophysics...I was wondering if anyone could recommend any interesting physics books (suitable for an A-level student)? I have heard that The New Quantum Universe is a good read but not sure how difficult it is.
Thanks for any recommendations.
I am going to be applying later this year for Natural Sciences at uni and hope eventually to specialise in Astrophysics...I was wondering if anyone could recommend any interesting physics books (suitable for an A-level student)? I have heard that The New Quantum Universe is a good read but not sure how difficult it is.
Thanks for any recommendations.
A great one I was recommended, but hard to track down:
"Black holes and time warps - Einstein's outrageous legacy" by Kip Thorne.
Its pretty much the entire history of astrophysics, right up to black holes yet very readable. Its a pretty huge book but it was well worth it. It covers big bang theory, evidence behind it, relativity, black holes, life cycles of stars, time travel, gravitational waves... you name it. Of course Thorne is also an acclaimed astrophysicist. So its from the man himself if you like.
Other good ones:
"The first 3 minutes" - Ive forgotten who by but a big name.
"In Search of the Big Bang" - John Gribbin (Poppy but good)
"Brief History of time" et al
All worth a read for sure.
Edit: If you want a general one thats readable as a bed time story if you like "Great Physicists" by Cropper. A really excellent book (and huge) that covers the lives and discoveries of just about every major physicist you can think of and in many different areas. I read it between AS and A2, its got some maths in it but I loved it. I still bring it with me to uni every term
I've read 'A brief history of time', just finished it actually, a great read. there was also 'The quantum universe', but I forgot who it's written by. I'm currently trying to find me a copy of 'Alice in quantum-land' and 'What einstein told his barber', they're both meant to be entertaining reads.
I skim-read an article today in American scientist about so-called 'Quantum Computers', does anyone have any idea about how these would work? Surely computers must work on the very non-quantum idea that a bit is either at the state 1 or 0... I'm going to read the article properly tomorrow
I skim-read an article today in American scientist about so-called 'Quantum Computers', does anyone have any idea about how these would work? Surely computers must work on the very non-quantum idea that a bit is either at the state 1 or 0... I'm going to read the article properly tomorrow
I skim-read an article today in American scientist about so-called 'Quantum Computers', does anyone have any idea about how these would work? Surely computers must work on the very non-quantum idea that a bit is either at the state 1 or 0... I'm going to read the article properly tomorrow
I started reading an article on that from Scientific American, but haven't gotten down to finishing it.
aiman
Scientific American
The Centipe
I've read 'A brief history of time', just finished it actually, a great read. there was also 'The quantum universe', but I forgot who it's written by. I'm currently trying to find me a copy of 'Alice in quantum-land' and 'What einstein told his barber', they're both meant to be entertaining reads.
I skim-read an article today in American scientist about so-called 'Quantum Computers', does anyone have any idea about how these would work? Surely computers must work on the very non-quantum idea that a bit is either at the state 1 or 0... I'm going to read the article properly tomorrow
I skim-read an article today in American scientist about so-called 'Quantum Computers', does anyone have any idea about how these would work? Surely computers must work on the very non-quantum idea that a bit is either at the state 1 or 0... I'm going to read the article properly tomorrow
Yeah, quantum computers work on principles of spin mainly. A particle may be spin up or spin down, now if you assign spin up to be 1 say, and spin down to be 0 you can assign info to a particle which can then be stored. The huge thing about quantum computing is that you can store more than 1 bit on a particle, because you can use different variables, on a couple of provisos we won't go into.
The states are altered by a magnetic field. If you apply a field you can flip the spin state. You can flip the states and have different proportions of a state, thanks to the quantum phenomenon of superposition. This gives options for huge amounts of information to be stored.
The problem thus far is that these "quibits" are very sensitive to the environment. in Quantum mechanics a particle interacts with its surroundings so that everything... apparatus, us, air... all can disturb the system and corrupt the measurement. The particles therefore have to be kept in complete isolation, which is only so far possible with fancy techniques like using NMR, ion traps (laser cooling to trap an ion) or through the use of "quantum dots" on a solid state material such as Silicon and germanium.
Because of these complications these "computers" are monsters, with their own electromagnets and so on! Not useful for home computing! Thus far they've only managed to create about a 16 quibit system. It has potential but it may not be realisable.
As it happens my tutor at uni is an expert in quantum computing
Princess Ana
Sounds interesting. I've vaguely heard about this sort of stuff, but not really looked into it - maybe you could give me/us a synopsis of the article when you've read it?
yes, I too would be interested to read it what date/edition is it? might look it up in the college library, its not something I know a lot about other than that outlined above. Im not sure exactly how it works
F1 fanatic
A great one I was recommended, but hard to track down:
"Black holes and time warps - Einstein's outrageous legacy" by Kip Thorne.
Its pretty much the entire history of astrophysics, right up to black holes yet very readable. Its a pretty huge book but it was well worth it. It covers big bang theory, evidence behind it, relativity, black holes, life cycles of stars, time travel, gravitational waves... you name it. Of course Thorne is also an acclaimed astrophysicist. So its from the man himself if you like.
Other good ones:
"The first 3 minutes" - Ive forgotten who by but a big name.
"In Search of the Big Bang" - John Gribbin (Poppy but good)
"Brief History of time" et al
All worth a read for sure.
Edit: If you want a general one thats readable as a bed time story if you like "Great Physicists" by Cropper. A really excellent book (and huge) that covers the lives and discoveries of just about every major physicist you can think of and in many different areas. I read it between AS and A2, its got some maths in it but I loved it. I still bring it with me to uni every term
"Black holes and time warps - Einstein's outrageous legacy" by Kip Thorne.
Its pretty much the entire history of astrophysics, right up to black holes yet very readable. Its a pretty huge book but it was well worth it. It covers big bang theory, evidence behind it, relativity, black holes, life cycles of stars, time travel, gravitational waves... you name it. Of course Thorne is also an acclaimed astrophysicist. So its from the man himself if you like.
Other good ones:
"The first 3 minutes" - Ive forgotten who by but a big name.
"In Search of the Big Bang" - John Gribbin (Poppy but good)
"Brief History of time" et al
All worth a read for sure.
Edit: If you want a general one thats readable as a bed time story if you like "Great Physicists" by Cropper. A really excellent book (and huge) that covers the lives and discoveries of just about every major physicist you can think of and in many different areas. I read it between AS and A2, its got some maths in it but I loved it. I still bring it with me to uni every term
I read both the first three minutes, and in search of the big bang, and i think brief history of time is about 3rd or fourth on my list, after relativity (by einstein, as stated earlier, DEFINITE read for anyone who wants a good overview without getting too technical), teach yourself geology (because i don't no much about it, but i like what i have read, and would like to do it in first year if i get in) and of course, the elegant universe, which I actually intend to finish this time!!!
I read in search of schrodinger's cat, and found it interesting, but then it went on a bit too much i felt, but thats just my opinion.
Are there any interesting, simplish books on em, because I haven't really read anything about it atm, but i would like to.
Thanks,
PK
M1N1
I read both the first three minutes, and in search of the big bang, and i think brief history of time is about 3rd or fourth on my list, after relativity (by einstein, as stated earlier, DEFINITE read for anyone who wants a good overview without getting too technical), teach yourself geology (because i don't no much about it, but i like what i have read, and would like to do it in first year if i get in) and of course, the elegant universe, which I actually intend to finish this time!!!
I read in search of schrodinger's cat, and found it interesting, but then it went on a bit too much i felt, but thats just my opinion.
Are there any interesting, simplish books on em, because I haven't really read anything about it atm, but i would like to.
Thanks,
PK
I read in search of schrodinger's cat, and found it interesting, but then it went on a bit too much i felt, but thats just my opinion.
Are there any interesting, simplish books on em, because I haven't really read anything about it atm, but i would like to.
Thanks,
PK
Can't think of any really simple EM ones. The problem with EM, at least in its core sense is that it is a) boring, and b) very mathematical, which doesn't make it very appealing as a popular science book.
You can only really do EM by chugging through the maths. It all comes from there and there is really very little conceptual stuff. You may be able to find some books on its development, a history of the people etc, like "great physicists" I mentioned earlier.
I would if I were you stay clear of EM, its really not nice and rather disheartening and well, hardcore maths, if you are really really keen then try getting your hands on a first year text book, but you may struglle with it as it will use maths you havent done yet. Multi integrals and vector calculus in particular
OK, I might try and stay clear of it for the moment then. I have been reading the Feynman lectures on physics, which I think are first year uni, but he explains everything so well, and I think that someone suggested it as a good read before going to do physics at uni, and I really like Feynman. If you want to read them, they are quite expensive (like £50 at least), and are red, in three parts. Another book by Feynman that is very good, is QED, which is set towards non-physicists, and was a great read.
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