PHY 3101 - Modern Physics - Fall 2018
Additional Modern Physics Material and Links
Interesting science links
- The Fermi paradox, or why haven't we already encountered intelligent life in the universe?
- Short video on measuring the speed of light with a microwave oven and a measuring tape
- 10 famous incidents of death by radiation
- News story about how our solar system is located within a bubble within our galaxy.
- The New Horizons 2014 Pluto mission with photographs. You can see its current location here.
- Putting time in perspective
- The 2017 solar eclipse. Here is an Interactive map where you can pan, zoom in and zoom out, though it's a bit clunky.
Fundamental constants, atomic and nuclear data
- World's best values of the fundamental constants from Particle Data Group (PDG)
- Extensive list of fundamental constants (pdf) from NIST
- World's best values of astrophysical constants from PDG
- List of elements with useful atomic data. This interactive periodic table is a good tool for exploring the elements.
- Accurate nuclide isotopic masses and abundances from NIST
- Much more extensive tabulation of nuclide masses and properties, organized by element. This database includes neutron rich nuclei produced by fission.
Useful online physics courses
- The Feynman lectures on phyiscs, made available by Caltech. These lectures provide a beautiful exposition of physics from basic mechanics to quantum theory. The online material here is divided into small chapters, each of which is nicely formatted in html with the equations showing up beautifully.
- The Physics Hypertextbook. This is a basic online reference book for all basic physics, including several topics in Modern physics.
- Modern Physics course at UVA (Michael Fowler). This online course has a lot of historical description as well as mathematics. The lecture topics are in the left hand navigation bar.
Applets/Tools
- Very useful physics applets from the PhET project at the University of Colorado.