DrBry The Physics Guy Podcast

This week is about nothing, nothing at all

I was reading an article  about trying to recruit people to study physics. It's not going as well as hoped, people are tending to move more towards carriers in say the computing industry earlier rather than later. I can understand this.

For me I think part of this is that we have lost some of the romance and indiana jones sprit of physics. Back in the day science was typically performed by very small teams or even individuals. 

Marie Curie worked with her husband for example. Faraday had is helps but was pretty much on his own. Einstein collaborated but always with small groups. Lots of papers were published by a single author. 

For this one we find ourselves in the trenches of the first world war were Karl Schwarzschild was serving in the German army. 

I am sure that I have pronounced his name wrong, but |I have heard so many versions that I don't know what is right. I did hear a German pronounce it Schwarzscheld, but they pronounce the Schwarz part in a fashion that is well beyond the vocal skill set of this scouser. So he's Karl Schwarzschild, or just Karl for short.

Just recently we were shown a picture of a black hole. There was a whopping big news event broadcast simultaneously all over the world where they showed the first picture of a black hole.

I've got a couple of issues with this one. Sadly for me the artists impressions of what a black hole might look like actually looked far more interesting and cooler than the actual picture of the black hole. So that was a bit of a let down.

Given this coverage about  Black holes, you could easily be mistaken for thinking that black holes are real and exist. You would be a fool not to I reckon. So are we all fools?

Diamonds are made out of carbon, and this post is on Carbon. The material from which diamonds and we are made. 

That always strikes me as a bit odd, the hardest known substance and the stuff of life turn out to be the same thing. Graphene the wonder material is also made out of carbon, it really is the element that keeps giving eh?

Nope, we are not about saving the planet, although that is a very worth idea. Today were going to take a look at something that is truly remarkable. The conservation laws of Physics.

There is no doubt that I will return to each of these in turn in later posts, so consider this as a bit of an introduction. There are four that will get a mention here and they are, in no particular order;

Conservation of mass-energy
Conservation of linear momentum
Conservation of angular momentum
Conservation of electric charge

Hi Everyone

today's post is more a question on why is physics so boring? Seriously, why do people think physics is mindnumbingly dull?

If your one of the people who doesn't think physics is as dull as ditch water, then you may be surprised by my assertion that physics is about as boring as it gets. You are also probably an adult. 

Trip to a Dentists vs a physics lesson, most kids would be off to the dentist for sure. 

I've been wondering about this and whether or not it is true that school physics is really crap, so I asked a few teachers I know, as well as a couple of university lecturers and the consensus to my surprise was that, physics was indeed exceptionally dull.

I need to put this in context though, all agreed that school physics, not physics in general, just school physics is awful. 

At the moment the physics they teach at school is agony and given the choice most of the teachers would join their pupils in a trip to the dentist than do another physics double. 

Why is this? I don't know if this next assertion is true and there are no official figures to confirm or deny so I'm taking it from the teachers I have chatter with. 

There was some talk that these days many physics graduates simply don't go into teaching. They are offered far better paying jobs out in the world and for many people who want the chance to buy and own a home this is a way to go.

What this means is that those teaching physics at school are often not physics graduates and do not see physics from the holistic point of view, 

so while they can teach the syllabus and show people how to solve problems they don't have the ability to demonstrate some of the truly cool interconnections across the subject that only come after years of study, these are those gold nuggets of information that don't make it into the course or are only briefly touched upon but have considerable influences on the field of physics.

A couple of obvious ones being the speed of light and Planck's constant, which are mentioned as numbers at school but not as the mythical creatures they actually are. 

Also, it is well known that physics for whatever the reason is actually difficult to teach, but the most common reason that physics is boring at school level is because yep, it is really boring at school level. the best experiments involve a spring and some weights, or a battery and a voltmeter, yippee, happy days.

These experiments are for kids who have mobile devices with social media such as SnapChat, Tik Tok, Instagram an a million interesting, time consuming apps designed to entertain and deliver dopamine hits, unlike ...physics.

The odd thing though is that people like physics, grownups love it,  particularly the more difficult ideas and concepts. If you go on say YouTube and look up the number of view on Gravitation, Dark matter, string theory etc then you find a lot of people interested. Don'talk get me wrong, we are not in the region of Gangnam Style views, but some do attract multi-million views and that is a lot of interest.

So the question I suppose is what can we do about school physics to make it more interesting? After all in order to migrate(?) to higher levels of physics it is absolutely essential to get a firm grounding and a firm understanding of the basics, how do we do that? This is again where I get confused because we seem to do something very odd when teaching physics and it is this... for want of a better term, we lie. And I wonder if this is part of the reason we come unstuck.

Take the atom for example, we teach kids that there is a nucleus and that there are electrons that orbit in different levels a bit like planets, when we know this isn't true.

We talk about Newtonian gravity, without pointing out that ultimately it's wrong....