Thursday, April 24, 2008

Special topics lecture next tuesday

On Tuesday 28 April, we have a "special topics" lecture scheduled. If you can suggest anything - related to the ph102 material, at least tangentially - that you might be interested in hearing about, let me know before the end of the weekend.

If there are several topics I think I can work up on short notice, I'll pick the one I think has the most broad appeal. If no one suggests anything, I will talk about what it is I do.

Other possibilities:

  • how does MRI/PET/CAT work?
  • how does your iPod work? (related to what I do)
  • more bad movie physics
  • how do semiconductor devices (transistors/flash/whatever) work?
  • length scales, from nuclei to galaxies
  • something you think I did a poor job explaining the first time around :-)
Leave a comment here (or email me) to vote on one of these, or suggest another topic.

And no, it won't be on the final. This one is supposed to be purely curiosity-driven, "for fun."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

bad movie physics sounds pretty entertaining

pleclair said...

I think so ... and so do some other people:

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/

A couple of people at U. Central Fla. have done some neat (published) work with this.

http://www.physorg.com/news106397085.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1167v1

One of my favorites is "The Core." One hardly knows where to begin.

Anonymous said...

Ditto on bad movie physics