Helpmyphysics

During my visit to CERN I had the privilege to speak to particle physicist Rolf Landau. Rolf gave our sixteen strong Scottish physics teachers (plus about fifty English physics teachers) three lectures on the history of particle physics.
Rolf also hosted a couple of question and answer sessions about various aspects of what is happening at CERN.

It was Rolf`s introduction about the curiosity that is needed to become a great physicist that caught my imagination.
I took the opportunity to ask him to record that advice to the many Scottish young people who are about to take up Physics.
You`ll find the recording below.

Rolf works on antimatter and was a consultant to Dan Brown`s Angels & Demons movie.

CERN EDUCATION

 

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Colliding Particles – Episode 2: Big Bang Day from Mike Paterson on Vimeo.

OK so you have chosen to study physics over the next two years at Standard grade or have chosen Intermediate 1,2 or are even crashing the Higher.

Congratulations! You have chosen a cracking good subject in physics and I wish you well.

Want to see top class physicists in action? Then follow this brilliant series documenting the lives of physicists working at the Centre of European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva Switzerland.

I had the great privilege of visiting CERN last week along with 15 other physics teachers from all over Scotland. It was great to see people from all over the world working on the great mysteries of the Universe.

Who knows that by the end of your school physics you could be on your way too to answering the great questions of science.

Colliding Particles

Click on the picture below to read an interesting article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will be switched on this week

This is a great site to help you understand the electric circuits you have been studying.
You can run it on your computer or download it and use it offline.

PHET Circuit Construction

Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.

This afternoon I fetched the cannister and took the photographic film out. My son John scanned the photographic film and with the aid of some image software made the image negative.

The result is the picture above.

The picture clearly shows the path of the sun through the sky over the last six months.
I believe you can see we didn`t have a great summer by the broken lines at the top. More sun shone in the month of October.

This has been a fascinating simple project that was carried out very easily.
If you want to try out the project then follow the link below.
In a few weeks time it will be the winter solstice when the sun will be in its lowest arc across the sky. Try it out over the next six months and make a record of the sun`s path yourself.

Solar Path Experiment

It is forty years since the crew of Apollo 11 went to the moon in a historic journey that captivated all mankind in the summer of 1969.
As a young boy aged 8 it was a fascinating and exciting time. I can always remember those summer evenings keeping up to date with reports from the BBC and ITV.
On the night of the moonlanding I was thrilled that the tv stations actually kept broadcasting well into the early morning hours. This was unheard of then.
If you want to find out what it was like in those days then click on this link which is telling the story of the epic moon mission in real time.
There is a special widget that keeps you informed about the mission as it happened in July 1969.

We choose to go to the moon.

PS I am so grateful to my late father for waking me up in the early hours of Monday July 21st 1969 to witness the most historic moment of mankind`s history to date.

Have some fun from the Institute of Physics website`s spooky physics.
Perhaps you can get your physics teacher to do some of the experiments during the last week of the session.
Click on the picture above to enter the spooky house.

The Science museum in London is celebrating 100 years. The curator has chosen the top ten scientific objects that changed the world.
Among them are the Apollo 10 command module that was used for the moon landing dress rehearsal, the penicillin culture that Alexander Graham Fleming used and the first X-ray machine.
Flick through the above slides to see the rest.

Science Museum

It is 40 years ago this week that NASA launched the final practice mission before landing on the moon.
It is amazing to think that in 1969 there was no internet or multi channel cable tv to follow this momentous mission.
The whole world watched the drama of the Apollo missions from only two channels BBC and ITV.
These missions `launched` many a science teacher`s career.
Nasa has a wonderful project to commemorate these missions. Click the link below to enjoy them.

Apollo X

WolframAlpha is a really special search engine that can compute your questions for you. Check out this description of how it works.
Try entering into the WolframAlpha search box words like pressure, density, velocity etc. You`ll never wonder what these units are again.
Go on experiment with this wonderful search engine and you`ll learn so much.

WolframAlpha