Friday 7 March 2014

Night Over Day Over Night, Examining Our Perception of Time

Night Over Day Over Night





I love time. I like wearing my watch, keeping track of where my day is going and I absolutely hate being late. Time is governed mainly by the passing of days and nights: we work through the day and sleep at night. This is the periodicity we all live by. But what if you tried to break this cycle? What is you decided how long your day would be? In 1974, in the small town of Los Almos, New Mexico, a man named Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum – a mathematical physicist who helped pioneer chaos theory (a post on this is soon to come) – decided that a 24-hour day simply wasn't long enough.

Saturday 1 March 2014

My Week in the World of Physics

This week in my life as a physics student

I am a third year physics student studying at Strathclyde university and this week has been a really good week  and I just wanted to share this with all of you who may end up reading this.

I have been organising taking part in an internship with the university during this summer coming, and this week I finally got all my applications sent off! It is even more exciting because the internship is going to be in conjunction with the Beatson Cancer Research institution so I will be working along side the leading experts in cancer research to try and help advance the imaging techniques used in analyzing cancer cells. I applied to a number of funding bodies one of which is the Carnegie Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship. 


Sunday 23 February 2014

Entropy a full, yet simple definition.

I am a third year physics student and have been given an assignment as part of my statistical physics call to discuss how I would explain entropy to a class of senior high school students in order to show my understanding it. This is what I have come up with and would appreciate any feed back and especially highlighting anything I got wrong.


Entropy

First I would define Entropy in the most succinct way “Energy depends to disperse”. So everything from a candle being lit that disperses heat energy out from the flame, to a rock being dropped into a pool of water and the energy going out in the form of the ripples and splashes.