DrBry The Physics Guy Podcast: Recent Episodes
DrBry
If you have ever been fascinated by popular science and longed to explore physics on a deeper level but found text books dull and impenetrable? Have you ever listened time and again to how "all physicists agree" and thought to yourself, no wonder we are in trouble if they all agree to that! Then this is maybe for you. Having grown bored of the religious dogma that often passes for physics these days, Dr Bry decided to take a look for himself, his battle cry "Nullius in Verba", On the word of no one. Allow Dr Bry to be your guide as you embark on an exciting journey of discovery into the wonders of our amazing universe.
This week we look at number 4 in our list of 5 constants, Boltzmann's.
While possibly the least popular of the 5, I am convinced that it plays a central role in our theory of everything.
For me, Coulomb and his constant are one of the most amazing things in physics and I genuinely believe that a theory of everything will involve this constant.
One thing we all sort of know is Gravity. It is the thing that keeps us pinned to the earth. In this episode, we talk about that amazing constant Big G, the gravitational constant.
This one is important because as we will see in later episodes, it may be that we have it all wrong.
This week we wrap up the speed of light but not before discussing just how cool and interesting it really is.
This week we meet continue with our story of the speed of light and how Einstein managed to take a negative physics result and turn it into something incredible.
This week we meet the first of our constants that we need in order to explain just how the universe works.
We will build on this to give us the simple physics theory of everything.
Welcome to a new season.
Imagine if everything is simpler than we think.
This time round I'm going to see if it is possible to explain everything in such a way an 8-year-old could understand it.
We are getting closer to the finish line. This week the mystery of Ettore Majorana, neutrinos and dark matter.
This week we meet the expanding universe, dark matter, dark energy, Majorana gets a mention and we wonder about the big bang.
This week I take my idea of the neutrino a little further. We take a look at what I think may be responsible for dark matter and I also give you a bit more info on the graviton.
Mbappe, black holes, supernovas and me struggling to say Magellanic cloud. What's not to love.
This week we have a bit more on general relativity and why I think we are all wrong about ignoring it when it comes to the neutrino.
Where we move on to and intro to gravity and electrostatics, two things we need to explain our neutrino
where we finally get the last part of what I think neutrinos are and get ready for the next part of the adventure.
Me having a bit of a rant and introducing you to me idea on how to make the universe simpler.
Or another Scouser off on one.
This week everyone gets a mention, and I go off on a trip that started with Maxwell and is yet to be completed
This week a Covid ridden Dr Bry tries to give you some idea of why he thinks his latest discovery is something truly amazing.
Our man Clifford gets another mention, surviving the pandemic, Lorentz, imaginary numbers and the answer to everything.
This is a bit of a departure from the planned post, but I came across something funny and thought I'd share it with you. Hope you enjoy it.
Was Einstein actually the unluckiest of people who ever lived?
It dawned on me a while back that he might have been.
In this one I go on a bit about hammers and screws, actually, I go on far longer than I should probably have, but what are you going to do? Join me to see if I am right about our man Albert.
Got a few more of these but going to take a break for a month and do somehting else! atomic and some magnetism I reckon.
enjoy.
This is part 2 of space the final frontier.
When I think of space, I often think about Star Trek, the final frontier, you know what I mean, or I may think about some of the incredible photos that we get from telescopes things like the Hubble.
If you don't happen to know much about the hubble telescope it's amazing, for one thing it is in space. We have a telescope in space! Think about that, we have put a telescope in space.
This post is all about telescopes
This week we are going to talk about something that I reckon fascinates everyone to some degree and is one of the most accessible and least accessible subjects in physics, which may seem an odd thing to say, but you will get what I mean in a minute. the subject is Space
Space, the final frontier. Don't forget to watch the videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk
In this one I start off talking about the moon program and then move onto one of the true wonders of physics, the creation, or rather, the discovery of things that don't exist anywhere else in the entire universe!
This week I am covering something that I find truly mind blowing. I'll be honest, I am one of those people that when I start to think about anything to do with the world, I end up sitting their in pure wonder and awe. I am lucky that sometimes I get things, I understand the incredible beauty of something. the other day for example, my cat managed to catch, kill and eat a bird. I know this because it left a bird leg and wing in the living room.
I was a bit upset at first, I'm a big fan of birds and the thought that my cat had scoffed one was a bit disconcerting, but when I actually stopped and took a look at the wing and the leg of the bird, you can't help but wonder at how clever it all is, it's just incredibly intricate. Which brings me to this weeks subject which has nothing whatsoever to do with birds or flight for that matter. It is though wonderous in the extreme, it is so fantastic that even telling you makes me wonder if it is not just some weird flight of fancy, but here goes, get on this...
today we are going to start were we left off last week, were we were talking about nuclear fusion. Joining hydrogen atoms together to create helium and in doing so, releasing an absolute shed load of energy. ...
then I'm going to mention the rather odd story of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons
there is also a physics joke in there, though you will be excused if you miss it.
Liverpool's recovery, changing lead into gold, transmutation no less. Goldfinger, thorium, and Chris Hemsworth get a mention, so does Bruce Banner come to think of it.
Pound Rebka and Mossbauer are all featured in this all singing all dancing episode. Enjoy.
This one is about Cosmology and the story of Halton Arp
now and again I like to do the odd post about people in science. Most of the time we tend to stick with the firm favourites, Einstein, Newton, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, maybe Steven Hawking and so on. These are the people that are the mega stars of the business.
There are loads of others, many people that most of us have never heard off. A dude I know recently went to a University to study physics, during his application interview he didn't realise that the guy interviewing him was actually a Nobel prize winning physicist. What made it funnier was they guy actually asked him "do you know who I am?" and he replied "no, sorry, I have no idea!" Despite this faux par he still got a place.
My point is that there are lots of famous physics people who are actually only famous to those in the specific sub field within physics, outside of it, not one has heard of them and this is true of any profession.
One such person is a guy called Halton Arp who died back in 2013.
Have you ever been hit by static electricity? or seen a cat covered in packing peanuts? this one is about that.
Me telling you just how cool lasers are, as if you didn't know. This is part 1, I had to do it in two parts because it is just to cool to be covered in 1 session.
This is were we meet the miracle of superconductivity, an Irish bloke called Jack Traynor and a Dutch fella who makes fantastic fridges.
Today we are working on the idea that there was a big bang about 13 billions years ago, and the universe has been expanding from this big bang, ever since.
Recent experiments seem to show that the universe is actually expanding faster than we initially thought. In fact the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. There are some people who doubt these results and think they may be wrong, but for now we are working on the idea that the interpretation of the results is correct and we really are in a universe which has an accelerating expansion. Cool.
This causes a bit of a problem though. In a previous post I mentioned Newton's second law. This law basically says that to accelerate something you have to be giving it a shove, thre has to be a force. So the question then arises as to what is actually giving the universe a shove? If it is accelerating then some force must be in play.
Today we are going to talk about something that still causes, not only confusion, but a fair amount of controversy.
That in itself is amazing because it is a mystery that started about 300 years ago and hasn't really been solved yet. People have been arguing about this for over 300 years!
Today's subject of interest is wave particle duality. This is also one of the few talks were I'm going to stick an equation in. I'm only doing this because I stumbled across it a while back and I don't know what it means, if anything. I'll throw it in later.
Mass is really easy to explain right?
may be not.
did you know there is more than one type of mass? or maybe there isn't?
This one is easy right, we all know everything there is to know about energy
except... what it is!
These days radioactivity has a seriously bad rep. The problems at 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima demonstrate that when nuclear goes bad it does so in a spectacular and lethal fashion. Catastrophic really doesn't do it justice.
In a way this is a real shame because now just saying the word radioactive is enough to make people shudder. It is not a subject people want to go near and yet from a physics point of view, radioactivity, its discovery and study has lead to the most amazing leaps in our understanding of the physical universe.
I thought today I would do a bit of a general post on atoms and atomic nuclei, which got me thinking about radioactivity and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The first of these, radioactivity, I am going to post about here, the other, NMR, I'll do in a post shortly.
Hi Everyone
and welcome to this weeks podcast. Which is a bit of a strange one for me, because after 30 years, yes 3 zero years, 30 years Liverpool are once again the league champions. The last time they won I had a full head of dark hair and more energy than a Duracell battery.
I've been a Liverpool fan all my life and when I was a kid it was easy. I lived about a mile from Anfield, home of the mighty reds, so I could walk to the ground on match day. If I close my eyes I can still see every part of the journey in my mind.
When I was younger it was the quasar that made the papers much in the way that Black Holes tend to now. Over the years though the light of Quasars began to dim has the light of the Black Hole intensified and these days they seem to be hardly ever mentioned. Which is odd because they are still out there. In fact the latest thinking from the astrophysicists is that each quasar has a super massive black hole at its centre.
We are not sure how those super massive balck holes form, but they are super, they are massive, and they may be black holes.
If theories are correct, these blackholes have a mass ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of solar masses.
The Quasar was, and still is, one of the greats of the heavens. If the data is correct then the stats for these fellows is truly awe inspiring. In fact the numbers are so large that they really are way beyond comprehension.
One of the most amazing things in physics is taught to us when we are kids, it is done in such a way that it passes right by.
it's time to give it the credit it deserves.
If you want to be a physicist or think like a physicist, trust no one.
In this episode I explain why
This week I'm taking a look, briefly at quarks, the atom, radioactive decay and one of the miracles of physics, positronium.
Is believing that the earth is flat any different from believing in the Higgs boson or the big bang?
Your first reply maybe of course, one is madness the others are based on science. But how sure are you?
Could you prove the earth is round? what "evidence" would you use?
check out these two pieces of video, it is the same camera, the second image is actually lower in the atmosphere, but it has greater curvature. It's just a trick of the lens
https://youtu.be/4XEy2jh7Z-o?t=940
https://youtu.be/4XEy2jh7Z-o?t=1147
This discovery, this process, has had the most profound impact on the world and yet most people have no idea what it is.
We don't teach it at school and most people have never heard of it. If you have never heard of the Czochralski method I reckon by the end of this post you will be amazed that it isn't something everybody knows about.
It really is true that Most people have no idea what the Czochralski process or method actually is.
Yet it is the first step in a chain of events and processes that have changed the world in the last century beyond all recognition.
The reason you can read this now is because of Jan Czochralski. This post is about his fantastic process.
Macbeth, Kurtz, Particle Physics, Ivan Denisovich and Wolfgang Pauli. This weeks ponderings.
Friedmann's equation.
This was developed back in 1922 by Alex Friedmann when he was working on a model of the universe in terms of General Relativity,
mind blowing stuff and is often considered excruciatingly difficult mathematically.
It was developed before the idea of an expanding universe was accepted and yet it is still used today, it had that covered, how cool is that eh?
Most people these days have been sold on the idea that the entire universe started with a big bang.
I love the big bang idea for the very simple reason that it gets people to ask questions. The most common being, what came before the big bang?
We will get to that shortly. But lets ask the same question, what came before the big bang? from an historical point of view, by this I mean, what did we believe before we were sold the idea of the big bang?
Let's ask a few more questions .
where did the idea of the big bang come from?
What is the Big Bang? how did it get its name?
How do we know it happened? What is the evidence?
What does it mean for us if this theory is actually correct?
What does it mean if the theory is wrong? what happened if the Big bang didn’t happen?
This one is on something called Frames of Reference.
In Physics especially were motion is concerned, which is just about everywhere, you will often hear the term "Inertial Frame of Reference" or "Inertial Reference Frame", but what is it? Well, technically it can be described as follows (this one is taken from Wikipedia);
In physics, an inertial frame of reference (also inertial reference frame or inertial frame or Galilean reference frame) is a frame of reference that describes time homogeneously and space homogeneously, isotropically, and in a time-independent manner.
All inertial frames are in a state of constant, rectilinear motion with respect to one another; they are not accelerating in the sense that an accelerometer at rest in one would detect zero acceleration.
It goes on to say
Measurements in one inertial frame can be converted to measurements in another by a simple transformation (the Galilean transformation in Newtonian physics and the Lorentz transformation in special relativity). In general relativity, in any region small enough for the curvature of spacetime to be negligible one can find a set of inertial frames that approximately describe that region.
Glad we cleared that one up!
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....
Seems like there are two types of physicist these days, your regular run of the mill physicists who keeps there head down and doesn't rock the boat by suggesting anything out the ordinary and your contrarian physicists.
Freeman Dyson's name was returned as a contrarian physicist, I'd read one of his books years ago, so I knew who he was. I suspect Einstein may have been a contrarian physicist, he was also a German, like Sabine the contrarian physicist.
Welcome to Dr Bry, the Physics Guy. A scousers view of the natural universe.
This is a bit about me and my mission. Enjoy.