(Course description last updated for academic year 2017-18).
Learning Outcomes and Assessment

This course is not examinable, but the material covered overlaps with and illustrates many aspects of the Part II syllabus. It aims to consolidate core physics and provide revision of a number of key topics from a somewhat different perspective to that presented in the core course. The aim is to provide additional background to a number of major themes of physics, to sketch the connections between them and to investigate unresolved questions. Attendance is strongly advised for all Part II students. The lectures will cover the following topics:

Synopsis

The Nature of Physics - The Galileo Case: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and the Galilean revolution. The origins of experimental science, Galileo’s physics, what Galileo got right and what he got wrong. The trial of Galileo. Physics as a hypothetical-deductive system. Galilean relativity, the Newtonian revolution.

The Mechanical Origins of Maxwell’s Equations: What Maxwell actually did. Origins of electromagnetism, Maxwell and analogy in physics, vortices and magnetic fields, a physical model for the aether, the origin of the displacement current, Light as electromagnetic waves.  Maxwell's great paper of 1865. The introduction of fields into physics.   Hertz and the properties of electromagnetic waves. The discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics: The nature of heat, caloric theories, real steam engines and the genius of Carnot, the laws of thermodynamics, caloric as entropy, the origins of statistical mechanics, the statistical nature of the Second Law, the origin of irreversibility.

Scaling Laws in Physics and Elsewhere: Dimensional analysis and the Buckingham P theorem, general pendulum, explosions, drag in fluids, flow past a sphere, Kolmogorov spectrum of turbulence, law of corresponding states.  Chaos: Discovery of chaotic behaviour.  Necessary conditions for chaos. Damped driven non-linear pendulum, phase space diagrams, Poincare sections, bifurcation diagrams, Lorenz attractor. Logistic map, limit cycles, period doubling, Hyperion.  More non-linear behaviour:  Self-organised criticality, examples of scaling laws, fractals, sand piles.

The Origin of Quantum Mechanics (1): The route to the discovery of quanta and quantisation.  Classical derivation of the Stefan-Boltzmann law. Planck's (non)-statistical mechanics, how Einstein discovered photons. Fluctuations in particles and waves. Einstein's coefficients and the quantisation of photon momentum.  The photoelectic effect.  Compton scattering.

The Origin of Quantum Mechanics (2): The tortuous route to the discovery of quantum mechanics. The electron, the proton, Bohr model of atoms, Sommerfeld and the old quantum theory, quantum selection rules, vector model of the atom, the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Bohr's models of all known atoms.  The Heisenberg breakthrough. Born, Jordan, Dirac, Schrodinger, Pauli - what they actually did.  The completion of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.  The Dirac equation and antimatter..  

Relativity: The discovery of the Special Theory of Relativity, the difficult route to the General Theory, Mach’s principle, tests of General Relativity, gravitational waves and their discovery

Physics of the Cosmos: The technology of cosmology. Application of laboratory physics to the Universe on the largest scales: its successes, the origin of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, inflation and the limits of experiment and observation.  . .

BOOKS

The following books may be useful as background reading to help your understanding:

Theoretical Concepts in Physics, Longair M S (2nd edn 2003)

The Galileo Affair, Finocchiaro M A (U Calif Press 1989)

Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Pais A (OUP 1986)

Subtle is the Lord. The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Pais A (OUP 1982)

Scaling, Self-similarity, and Intermediate Asymptotics, Barenblatt G I (CUP 1996)

Does God Play Dice? Stewart I (2nd edn Penguin 1997)

Chaos: Making a New Science, Gleick J (Viking NY 1987)

Chaotic Dynamics - an Introduction, Baker G L and Gollub J P (CUP 1990)

Quantum Concepts in Physics Longair M S (CUP 2013)

 

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