Tuesday 16 June 2020

Physics Beyond the House


This is a follow-on from my previous post 'Physics in the House', which may be found here. In that post I collated links to a series of relatively brief videos made during the core period of the UK's 'COVID-19 lockdown' and provided a few background notes as well as links to additional material. Here I'm offering another collection of videos on foundational topics in Physics; their content will. however, be a little more challenging ...

It occurred to me whilst filming for 'Physics in the House' that I might re-purpose the video podcasts I created of the 'Foundation Year' lectures* I delivered during the academic year beginning September 2012. I had downloaded these podcasts prior to my retirement as an academic from the University of Kent's School of Physical Sciences simply because I wanted an archive of the material I'd invested a lot in generating (see my blog post here for some insight) and I knew that it would all be deleted automatically. It was vanity of course, as so much is. The material is of no use to my old department now but, although the syllabus, style of delivery and lecturer may change, the fundamentals of Physics do not; I have their permission to make them available to a new set of students. The content is at a level which, roughly speaking, corresponds to the final two years of school education in the UK (so-called 'A'-level). I still have in mind as my target audience the ever-learning members of my local University of the Third Age group, which has a membership numbering well over 1000 - many of whom love learning about topics in science despite being non-scientists (whatever that might mean).

Few projects are straightforward, and this one is no exception. My original plan was to upload the lectures in their original form: raw, unabridged. Unfortunately, I found several podcast video files were corrupted in some way. Thus, the overall continuity of the lectures would have been wrecked from the outset. What I have done in order to mitigate this problem is to extract whatever topics exist in a reasonably 'complete' form within the surviving recorded lectures using a process of 'cut & paste' in the basic video editing package on my PC. Given the imposed necessity of going through my archive more carefully than originally planned I have taken the opportunity of chopping out a lot of 'extraneous' material. For instance, a very significant fraction of the two major lecture courses that I've plundered for these new single-topic videos were given over to working through relevant numerical problems and to discussing the various student-defined issues worthy of in-class discussion. (These discussions, by the way, could take us way off the syllabus - which was no bad thing in my opinion. Very early on in my relationship with each year's new batch of students I'd make it pretty obvious that I was open to being sidetracked: the result, most years, was a rich seem of enthusiasm-building gold! We always got the core material covered; it always seemed to work out.) I have removed all this material. Thus, the sum total of video time remaining is reduced even further. Having said all that, the resultant series is arguably stronger than it would have been had I simply made available the four dozen or so 50-minute lectures I originally intended to share. Each of these topic-centred videos has a running time in the range 12 to 42 minutes, although most fall within the shorter half of that range. The definitive judgement rests with the viewer of course.

Naturally, much of the 'raw' character is retained. You'll see the younger me in good health and poor, occasionally stumbling, wearing thick sweaters during the prolonged period when the lecture theatre heating failed, needing to shout over the sound of hammer drilling, strolling around and waving my hands about, ...  More annoyingly, you'll also see plenty of evidence for the fact that I was still learning about video-recording of lectures, despite having been one of the very first people to adopt the technology at my university: the volume will be excessively soft in some places and I'll wander out of shot now and again whilst be way too close when I happened to cough or need to blow my nose. You get the picture.

Although there was an extensive 'reading list' associated with the original lectures, my two top recommendations both came from the same author: Jim Breithaupt. I'm absolutely certain that there are now more up-to-date editions, but the above are what I used as the primary backup material for the courses. My drawing skills are notoriously poor, so I am particularly grateful for the fact that so much excellent graphical material exists already. The other resources I drew on for the occasional illustration and for ideas for numerical examples include the house magazines of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Society of Chemistry, the science pages of the BBC News web site and whatever other school-level material I could lay my hands on; I think the latter is covered by the image shown below.  In addition, you'll see a small number of animations within the video series; the web sites on which they may be found are of course displayed on the captured PC display, some  of these may not exist anymore - that is the nature of internet material - but a search using the relevant subject matter as keywords will inevitably turn up a satisfactory alternative.


I plan to get all the videos created and then to upload them at a rate of one every day or two: I'll keep this post updated as things progress.

There are two principal strands: 'Matter' and 'Waves & Vibrations'. The outline of their (surviving content is shown below, including links to the relevant video. In total, these 36 videos represent almost 13½ hours of lecture material - a tiny fraction of my overall teaching commitment within a typical academic year. I have also included an extract from a short series of lectures given on the topic of laboratory work, which covered what's needed in a formal report (and why) together with an overview of elementary error analysis and why that is so very important. I include in this series only the section on errors/uncertainties since COVID-19 has underlined once again the importance of understanding something of uncertainties in experimental data.


1.   Uncertainties associated with experimental data and results.
Topics in the Physics of Matter:
2.   The Atom: Early beginnings, basic descriptions; the nuclear atom, atomic mass and number.
3.   Avogadro’s number, the mole.
4.   More on the Atom: electrons, isotopes, ions.
5.   Types of matter: solids, liquids and gases etc., phase changes.
6.   Chemical bonding: covalent, ionic, metallic, van der Waal, hydrogen.
7.   Inter-atomic forces and potential energy.
8.   Electron excitation
9.   Electron energy levels, emission and absorption spectra.
10. The Bohr model of the atom: energy levels in hydrogen explained.
11. Atomic-scale structure of crystals, polymers and plastics, amorphous materials.
12. X-ray diffraction 
13. Fluids: pressure, Archimedes’ principle, hydrostatics.
14. Heat and temperature scales.
15. Thermometers: gas, resistance, expansion, thermoelectric, optical; notes on absolute temperature, cosmic radiation background.
16. Thermal conduction 
17. Perfect gas laws 
18. Kinetic theory of gases
19. Radioactivity: half-life, decay chains, radioactivity in nature. 
Topics in the Physics of Waves & Vibrations:
20. Definitions and Terminology: oscillations, waves carry energy, progressive wave.
21. Wave properties-i: wavelets, reflection, refraction.
22. Wave properties-ii: dispersion, diffraction, superposition, interference + earthquakes
23. Wave properties-iii: standing/stationary waves
24. Sound-i: introduction - what are sound waves? 
25. Sound-ii: loudness, noise, note, pitch; intensity, intensity level/decibel; ultra-/infra-sound. 
26. Sound-iii: reflection, refraction, interference; beats.
27. Sound-iv: vibrating wire (standing waves), standing waves in tubes; Doppler effect.
28. Electromagnetic spectrum-i: Introduction.
29. Electromagnetic spectrum-ii: Generation and detection of EM waves; making an fm aerial.
30. Electromagnetic spectrum-iii: refraction of light, critical angle, optical fibres; polarisation.  
31. Electromagnetic spectrum-iv: diffraction; interference, Young's double slit experiment. 
32. Electromagnetic spectrum-v: transmission diffraction grating; Michelson interferometer.  
33. Simple Harmonic Motion-i: circular motion, link to simple harmonic motion.  
34. Simple Harmonic Motion-ii: link between SHM and circular motion, displacement, velocity and acceleration; force acting on a body undergoing SHM, mass on a spring. 
35. Simple Harmonic Motion-iii: pendulum, energy in SHM, general expression for SHM. 
36. Damping and Resonance: light, heavy and critical damping; natural frequency, resonance.



* I helped to start the Foundation Year programme in Physics more than two decades before I retired. It provided a route into the first year of a 'conventional' Physics degree for those students who, for one reason or another - for instance, having studied subjects at school which didn't include sufficient mathematics - didn't qualify for the more usual direct entry. In short, it provided a 'second chance'; I'm a big fan of second chances in education.

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