Mr Whitehurst's Physics Resources

A web storeroom with resources to support the learning of A-Level Physics. Presentations can be found here at Slideshare. Follow the Twitter feed here at Mr Whitehurst Physics

[colliderblog]

Carl Sagan and The Pale Blue Dot

[colliderblog]

<—-We are here…………

photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1

[mrwhitehurst]

Voyager is a telescope that has been travelling out of the Solar System since the mid 1970s. This is the most recent image of Earth, showing the distance travelled after about 40 years.

[mrwhitehurst]

I was absentmindedly stirring a cup of hot tea, when I got to thinking, "aren't I actually adding kinetic energy into this cup?" I know that stirring does help to cool down the tea, but what if I were to stir it faster? Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring?

Will Evans

http://what-if.xkcd.com/71/

A beautiful description and explanation of why stirring your tea is counter-intuitive and totally ineffective whatever the expected result.

[mrwhitehurst]

After the Higgs hype, Cern still has as much purpose and passion as ever

You don't need to be a scientist to appreciate the excitement and sense of discovery that pervades Cern, the world's great mecca of particle physics? Suzanne Moore went to visit

A really nice Guardian piece on what it is like to work at CERN. A good read for anyone going on the CERN trip next year and a definite must read for any Y12s who have been studying Quantum Physics with Mr Hannah or Mr Watson-Lee.

[itsokaytobesmart]

Tour our cosmic neighborhood without such pesky requirements as spaceship, high-tech life support systems, warp drive, or putting on pants: 100,000 Stars from Google Chrome Workshop

[mrwhitehurst]

A very nice animation. Enjoy!

[brookhavenlab]

Even Nobel Prize winners like to play with Legos. Here, Peter Higgs — theorist of the eponymous Higgs particle — signs a Lego scale model of the ATLAS detector, which was instrumental in tracking down the particle that carries his name (and endows some particles with mass). 

[colliderblog]

WANT!

[teded]

The uncertain location of electrons - George Zaidan and Charles Morton

Animation by Karrot Animation

[secretst0rms-deactivated2015042]

A more accurate depiction of an electron’s wave-particle duality!

An electron can appear in one place (point A), disappear, and reappear in a totally different place (point B) without us observing any sort of “travelling” to get from point A to point B.

[mrwhitehurst]

This is a beautiful, albeit chemistry focused, explanation of wave particle duality when we look at electrons.

[mrwhitehurst]

Follow the link below or click on the picture to see the full strip. It's well worth it.

http://imgur.com/r/pics/66DxiHX

One for all students thinking about jobs, careers and university places. It's a bit soft, a bit woolly but I like it. 

What do you think?

If you want to find out more about the person that created the original comic, look at the below link.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/10/bill-watterson-interview/

[physicsandchemistryrevision]

A2 Physics G484

Quick notes Kepler’s third law & Deriving Newton’s equation using Kepler’s third law See “Quick notes: Centripetal motion”

[mrwhitehurst]

Useful for y13 physicists.

[mrwhitehurst]

Homework. Oh and remember, there's a test on everything you have learnt so far on the course next week. Revise this weekend!

[mrwhitehurst]

Can science fiction ever get the science right?

New film Gravity promises to rekindle the debate over how "hard" - or accurate - science fiction should be. Should film-makers adhere to basic scientific principles, or should audiences just feel the magic instead, asks Peter Ray Allison.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24518305

[sciencesoup]

The Planet with Four Suns

A binary system is a solar system in which two stars orbit one another, locked in a dance around their centres of gravity. Astronomers estimate that about half the stars in the universe are found in pairs, but not long ago, we were unsure whether these systems could actually host planets—but in the past couple of years, we’ve found over sixteen binary systems with planets orbiting them. One of these planets, PH1, is particularly interesting. Last year, volunteers on the citizen science website Planet Hunters, Kian Jek of San Francisco and Robert Gagliano of Cottonwood, Arizona, discovered an exoplanet in a system of not one, not two, but four stars. This quadruple star system is named KIC 4862625 and is about 3,200 light-years from Earth. Its planet, named PH1, is thought to be a gas giant the size of Neptune, with about half the mass of Jupiter, and the radius of its orbit is 1000 times bigger than Earth’s. But it’s not orbiting four stars; rather, the planet is orbiting a pair of binary stars, which are then being orbited by another pair of binary stars. So from PH1, the sky would have two suns (imagine a double sunset!), then there would be also be two very bright stars in the night sky, wandering along against the backdrop of the universe. Finding exoplanets in binary systems is both incredibly fascinating and incredibly important, because it sends astronomers back to the drawing board with their models of planetary formation, trying to figure out how planets could evolve in such a dynamic environment.

Check out Planet Hunters—data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is uploaded for anyone to scan through and search for exoplanets

(Image Credit: Haven Giguere/Yale)

[mrwhitehurst]

Two sets of binary stars. Something that I got asked about recently during lessons on centripetal motion.

[mrwhitehurst]

A date for your diary

Dr Suzie Sheehy, a great speaker on Physics from the University of Oxford will be coming to Stokey to provide a talk on What Not to Do With A Hadron Collider.

http://www.youtube.com/user/drsuziesheehy

The lecture will be on Tuesday, 14th January. Make sure you are free and block it out in your diaries! 

[mrwhitehurst]

The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space - Wired Science

How does gravity work in Angry Birds in Space?

[mrwhitehurst]

Fluorescent Lighting and Cathode Ray Tubes

Fluorescent lighting and cathode ray tubes from Stoke Newington School

[mrwhitehurst]

New Scientist Talks and Book Launch - 13th November

A New Scientist event about Nothing

Here’s a puzzle for you: what do the big bang, a curse of death, men’s nipples, antimatter traps, superconductors, penguin chicks and zenon have in common? The answer is, of course, nothing.  That is to say, we don’t mean they are unrelated in any way. Quite the opposite. They are all connected by the notion of nothing – nada, nichts, niente.

Nothing is the intriguing theme of the latest book from New Scientist, to be published on 7th November. Take zero, a critically important number that took many centuries to come into existence before being shunned as a dangerous innovation. The vacuum, or void, that the Ancient Greeks argued about, that by 1930 had become the vacuum of quantum theory and is about as far from nothing as you can get. Or the perplexing scenario of the nocebo effect, where just a few words can kill someone.

Join the team from New Scientist and our panel of guest speakers for an entertaining evening of amazing insights into nothingness:

Marcus Chown (New Scientist consultant and best-selling author) on how the big bang came from nothing

Helen Pilcher (freelance writer and comedienne) talking about the nocebo effect

Jeremy Webb (New Scientist Editor-in-Chief) on the vacuum that was once believed to be nothing

Linda Geddes (New Scientist reporter and author) goes to the brink of nothingness and investigates what we know about anaesthetics and consciousness

Richard Webb (New Scientist Features Editor) on the origins and importance to our modern lives of zero 

Get something for nothing - included in your advance ticket price is a copy of the Nothing book (rrp £7.99).

  Doors to Conway Hall will open at 6pm, the talk will commence at 6:30pm. Drinks will be available from the bar when doors open and after the talk.

Tickets will be £10 on the door (subject to availability) but won’t include a copy of the Nothing book.

 The Nothing book included with your advance ticket will be available for collection on the night only. If you are unable to attend we will not be able to post the book to you after the event. This is limited to 1 book per ticket.

[mrwhitehurst]

Harvard Scientists Create First Lightsabers?

http://phys.org/news/2013-09-scientists-never-before-seen.html