212 results found for physics

Leo Esaki is a Japanese physicist who shared half the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Ivar Giaever for the discovery of the phenomenon of electron tunneling. The second half of the prize was awarded to Brian David Josephson. He is known for his i....

Helen Sharman, the UK's first astronaut, gives a vibrant account of her personal experience of life in space using models and film to illustrate the key scientific concepts involved in spaceflight. Among other things she discusses the way Newton's Th....

Shalini Golla presents on the science behind light.

Light is reflected off a flexible shiny surface fixed to the end of a plastic tube. When one speaks into the tubes sound vibrations pass down the tube and make the surface vibrate. The reflected light is therefore sent off from the surface in a con....

Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (now 150 years old) seemed in its comprehensive way to be capable of answering all of the questions one might ever pose about the theory of light. But that spell was broken in 1900 by Planck's discovery that light bea....

A review of the properties and behaviour of liquid crystals. Temperature effects.

Using a data-logger to analyse the performance of a longboard.

A few (surprising?) thoughts on how the wheels on a longboard or skateboard actually move.

This presentation reviews how magnets work and their uses in the world today. It also explains how magnets and electricity are related and what future inventions could come from using magnets.

Using our most advanced techniques and instruments we sift through study the cosmic microwave background as a relic of the early universe to understand the events surrounding the birth and subsequent development of the Universe.  A precision inspect....

Martinus J.F. Veltman, the Netherlands shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999 with Gerardus 't Hooft the Netherlands 'for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics'. Not all areas of Holland were very advanced when V....

Charles Hard Townes received the Nobel Prize for Phyiscs in 1964 'for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle' He was award half of the P....

A short clip showing the experimental measurement of the speed of electrical pulses in a cable - a large fraction of the speed of light.

A presentation showing how to measure the speed of sound over a short distance on a laboratory table.

A short clip showing the measurement of the speed of sound over short distances.

Mildred Dresselhaus was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in a poor section of the Bronx. She was a Fullbright Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University (UK) in 1951-52 and obtained a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1958. Mill....

Jonathan shows us with a cheap and simple homemade demonstration how your mobile telephone generates radio waves in order for you to use it to communicate.  As you will see you can use this method to explore many aspects of your mobile phone!

A presentation discussing the science of mobile phones and associated radiation. Are mobile phones safe?

The discovery of superconductivity in hole doped La2CuO4 was motivated by the interest to find this phenomenon in an oxide.  After the discovery near 35 K, copper oxides with transition temperatures of up to 131 K at normal pressure were found, i.e.....

A series of nine lectures from Leonard Susskind who is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics atStanford University, and Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.

p=mv. If external forces are zero, momentum is conserved. In collisions, energy may be conserved (elastic) or not (inelastic).

Kinematics quantifies motion without explaining the causes of it. Here we study accelerations that are zero, positive or negative.

During the Renaissance in Venice, composers such as the Gabrieli and Moneverdi created some of their greatest masterpieces for performance in the great churches on festive occasions. But what would the music have sounded like, given its complexity an....