PHY 3101 - Modern Physics - Fall 2015

Additional Material, Applets and Links to Other Web Sites

Interesting 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 Pluto mission with recent photographs
• Putting time in perspective
• 100th anniversary of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Articles in NYTimes, phys.org, space.com

Reference material

• 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
• Compendium of experiments tests of Special Relativity
• Compendium of experimental tests of General Relativity
• Accurate nuclide isotopic masses and abundances from NIST
• Periodic Table with useful atomic data

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.