11 Monday Apr 2011
Posted in school
This week’s BMC post will be a bit of a short, focused post about phase transitions and a nifty mathematical tool for looking at how they behave. I’m in the foggy head space of 4 hours of sleep right now, so forgive me if this is less of a science primer and more the ramblings of a madman.
03 Sunday Apr 2011
Posted in school
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I won't be lyin', or gettin' you pissed.
So, today’s BMC post will touch on a topic near and dear to all my readers hearts: magnets, how do they work? Well, dear reader, they are not in fact miracles, but the result of the interactions of spin lattices that can be described using the Ising model of magnetism. I shall endeavor to explain a few key features of this model to you, and let you know about a few cool things we can do with it. Continue reading
28 Monday Mar 2011
We’ve discussed in a couple of the past BMC posts the difference between Bosons and Fermions, and the degenerate states that fermions can form. Well, today I’m going to talk about something that you may have heard of, but probably have never had explained to you: Bose-Einstein Condensation. I’ll tell you a bit about what it is, and tell you about a cool application of them: atomtronics.
21 Monday Mar 2011
Posted in school
Ultraviolet, not ultraviolence
In some of the past BMC posts, I have blogged about how statistical mechanics, in the 19th century, came perilously close to uncovering quantum mechanics early. A number of “problems” with statistical mechanics arose due to the classical treatment used. One of the most serious was the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This problem was not easily solved with the hand-wavey pseudo-quantum explanations used in some previous cases. It took a full-on, quantized description of electromagnetism, and helped usher in quantum mechanics to being the foremost theory in subatomic physics.
13 Sunday Mar 2011
Posted in school
So, today’s BMC post is a bit unusual, in that we are focusing on a particular bit of physics history along with a fairly narrow subject: the heat capacity in metals.
13 Sunday Feb 2011
Posted in school
This weeks BMC post is a bit of an oddball. We’ve been asked to describe our favorite fermionic system. I’ll just leave this here:
It's where I keep all my stuff
Any guesses?
05 Saturday Feb 2011
So, in last weeks BMC post, I showed a number of probability distributions, one of which was the Fermi distribution. As you saw, at low temperatures, the Fermi distribution approached a step function. This itself was a bit weird, as it implied that there are particles in non-zero energy levels even when the temperature is zero. This distribution’s shape produces a number of bizarre properties, the great fun pop-science kind of things that makes physics popular among you, the unwashed masses (I kid, I love this stuff too).
Continue reading
31 Monday Jan 2011
So, for today’s BMC post, I’m going to be attacking a topic from a different angle. I’d like to show you all about thermodynamic distribution functions (mathematical functions that describe the number of particles across a range of some property). However, rather than simply explaining the properties to you in text, I’d like to tell you what the distributions describe, and then see what kind of properties we can derive from looking at the shape of the functions.
23 Sunday Jan 2011
Posted in school
So, I’ve already made you, dear reader, somewhat familiar with entropy (if not, go back and read this post). I have bad news, I am afraid: I LIED. But trust me, I had only the best intentions! The definitions I have given in the previous post are still completely correct, but simplified too far. The problem that arises from the old post is called the Gibbs Paradox, and I will in this post explain what this is, and how it is rectified.
17 Monday Jan 2011
Posted in school
Well, one semester down, one to go. And with it, a new array of classes. I am pleased to tell you, dear readers, that I have another statistical mechanics class, and that I will be continuing the blogging my class series for this new class. So, without further ado, allow me to present the first BMC post of 2011!
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