When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11... Or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal

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When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11... Or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal

Ronald E. Hatcher Science on Saturday Lecture Series 12 January 2019 When The Uncertainty Principle goes to 11... or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal Philip Moriarty Professor, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom ABSTRACT: There are deep and fundamental linKs between quantum physics and heavy metal. No, really. There are. Far from being music for Neanderthals, as it’s too often construed, metal can be harmonically and rhythmically complex. That complexity is the source of many connections to the quantum world. You’ll discover how the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes into play with every chugging guitar riff, what wave interference has to do with Iron Maiden, and why metalheads in mosh pits behave just liKe molecules in a gas. BIOGRAPHY: Philip Moriarty is a professor of physics, a heavy metal fan, a Keen air-drummer, and author of “When The Uncertainty Principle Goes To 11 (or How To Explain Quantum Physics With Heavy Metal” (Ben Bella 2018). His research at the University of Nottingham focuses on prodding, pushing, and poKing single atoms and molecules; in this nanoscopic world, quantum physics is all. Moriarty has taught physics for twenty years and has always been strucK by the number of students in his classes who profess a love of metal music, and by the deep connections between heavy metal and quantum mechanics. A frequent contributor to the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel, which won the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Award in 2016 for “for innovative and effective promotion of the public understanding of physics”, he has a Keen interest in public engagement, outreach, and bridging the arts-science divide. Moriarty is a father of three — Niamh, Saoirse, and Fiachra – who have patiently endured his off-key attempts to sing along with Rush classics for many years. UnliKe his infamous namesaKe, he has never been particularly enamored of the binomial theorem. .

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31 Diffraction and Interference.Pdf
Diffraction and Interference Figu These expar new .5 wave oday Isaac Newton is most famous for his new v accomplishments in mechanics—his laws of Tmotion and universal gravitation. Early in his career, however, he was most famous for his work on light. Newton pictured light as a beam of ultra-tiny material particles. With this model he could explain reflection as a bouncing of the parti- cles from a surface, and he could explain refraction as the result of deflecting forces from the surface Interference colors. acting on the light particles. In the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, this particle model gave way to a wave model of light because waves could explain not only reflection and refraction, but everything else that was known about light at that time. In this chapter we will investigate the wave aspects of light, which are needed to explain two important phenomena—diffraction and interference. As Huygens' Principle origin; 31.1 pie is I constr In the late 1600s a Dutch mathematician-scientist, Christian Huygens, dimen proposed a very interesting idea about waves. Huygens stated that light waves spreading out from a point source may be regarded as die overlapping of tiny secondary wavelets, and that every point on ' any wave front may be regarded as a new point source of secondary waves. We see this in Figure 31.1. In other words, wave fronts are A made up of tinier wave fronts. This idea is called Huygens' principle. Look at the spherical wave front in Figure 31.2. Each point along the wave front AN is the source of a new wavelet that spreads out in a sphere from that point.
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