Cheers to my maiden post!
Greetings all, I am Daryl.
I’m an Applied Physics major in Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
(Well technically, I’m in the Pure Physics track. But I’ve realised that the vernacular varies from institution to institution and the difference between both tracks of study can be fairly convoluted, so I’m going to go with “Applied”.)
Ever since I’ve entered University, I’ve had friends from other courses of study constantly asking me what I studied in school.
Their sense of curiosity was palpable.
That aside, I’ve observed that on social media, a significant number of them actively follow pages of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Atmospheric and Oceanic administration (NOAA) and even the spaceships launch videos of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
It’s easy to see that among the general populace, the level of interest for Physics is indeed present.
However, one major obstacle that exists is the fact that it’s nearly impossible to continue reading about the subject without being stopped by the intimidating jargon and mathematics involved.
So much so, that without a formal background in physics, it’s difficult to get very far.
And honestly, this shouldn’t be the case.
I’m all for the democratisation of scientific know-how.
Take investing for example.
One doesn’t need to have a professional money managing background to understand at least a high level overview, of the financial markets.
As it should be in Physics as well.
Today, a thorough understanding of physics has never been more critical.
As technological advances race ahead and the 4th industrial revolution gets well underway, we need a grasp of the attendant breakthroughs and accompanying ramifications, in order to embrace an uncertain future.
I’ve always loved writing as a means of sharing knowledge.
And now that I’m in love with physics as well, I figured that there exist few better ways to share my knowledge than by combining both passions into one.
As the eponymous title suggests, the goal here is to break down esoteric and obscure concepts, into digestible bites.
I aim to remove the dreary mathematics, the sleep inducing jargon, distill the core concepts and ideas and share them with you.
So join me on this journey, and maybe one day, you too, will see the awe, wonder, and hope that Physics holds for all mankind.
Background:
At the turn of the 20th century, some of the pioneering scientific minds pondered over many glaring flaws in existing scientific models.
One of those, was the model of the atom.
In 1913, Ernst Rutherford and Niels Bohr published a model of the atom, which we know today as the Bohr model.
Most people with an elementary understanding of chemistry or physics will remember the model.
Everything around us comprises of atoms.
Our bodies, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
Atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus, surrounded by negatively charged electrons.
However,
There were some glaring faults with this model, which made it inconsistent with scientific understanding at that time.
In 1913, the laws of electromagnetism were already well established and proven to be true.
The most well-known and fundamental law in electromagnetism: Coulomb’s law.
It states that the electrostatic repulsion between two bodies is proportional to their separation.
Now, it was known that atomic radii was tiny, at about 1 picometer.
That’s about ten-billionth of a meter.
Now take the already insanely small figure, and square it.
And then add it to the denominator.
You get an astronomically high figure.
The attractive forces between our nucleus and electrons, would be absolutely immense.
So this begs the question: Why aren’t these two objects, coming together, neutralising one another, turning everything we know, into pure nothing-ness
Some mysterious force was holding them apart?
Or, Niels Bohr and Ernst Rutherford were missing something.
Enter : Wave Particle duality
Simply put, any object, even you, is simultaneously, both a particle and a wave.
So, in essence, why the electron, does not collide with the nucleus and neutralise in puff of ice and fire. (GOT fans where you at?), is that our electron simply cannot collide.
The electron exists as a wave, surrounding the the nucleus.
And In layman’s terms, our electron is both everywhere and nowhere.
A more scientifically rigorous illustration can be seen below.
Each blue speck corresponds to a possible location of the electron.
We observe a larger concentration of specs closer to the nucleus, indicating that the likelihood of locating our electron is higher, the closer we get to the nucleus.
The concentration falls, as we get further. That much, makes sense.
But counterintuitively, there is still a chance we will find it, as we get further away.
Schrodinger equations
We’ve mentioned in our previous segment that the electron exists as a wave.
Now let’s go one step further and quantify this wave.
I would like to present, the following:
Now, we shall ignore the intimidating looking symbols for the moment.
It is a differential equation that is a function of both position (r) and time (t).
It is interesting to note that this equation has no exact solution.
It has multiple solutions even.
This is in line with the fact that our electron is everywhere and nowhere.
We can only give rough estimates as to its location.
Another more mind blowing fact, is that for all values of r and t, there exists a non-zero solution.
The implication is that:
Everywhere, from the tip of your nose, all the way, out to the distance corners of the universe, the electron may be found.
For all time, now and into the distant future, the electron may also be found.
The electron is truly both everywhere nowhere.
It will has and will continue to pop in and out of existence, for all time.
So this essentially sums up the bulk of the content of my maiden post.
In the years to come, I’ll be learning about far more advanced topics in physics, including but not limited to information theory, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum electro dynamics, cosmology, nuclear physics.
In the meantime, I am also in the process of picking up Machine Learning methods.
So, in the near future, do expect even cooler projects to emerge from this space.
One thing that is in the early stages of planning, and I’m planning to launch one day is the classification and discovery of exoplanets with hidden Markov models.
Which basically involves analysing the dip in starlight, as planets pass in front of a star.
And who knows, I may one day just discover a hidden planet, in the far reaches of another star system.
