physics

The Powder Toy is a free physics sandbox game, which simulates air pressure and velocity, heat, gravity and a countless number of interactions between different substances!

Powdertoy website

The website should auto detect your Operating system so go ahead and click the download button.

download button

When the save dialogue appears click save

Save to a useful location
Go to where you saved the .zip file
Right click and extract archive ( the exact procedure will depend on your OS.
Extract the files to where you saved the .zip file

Extract files

You will end up with a set of files.

Extracted files

Run powder toy

The running program will look similar to this.

running program

Very basic demo video

@powdertoy@diode.zone

#powdertoy,#sandbox,#physics,#game

November 17, 2020

Physicists Pin Down Nuclear Reaction From Moments After the Big Bang

Physicists Pin Down Nuclear Reaction From Moments After the Big Bang

Quanta Magazine Article

NASA Time Line Of Universe

#physics,#cosmology,#science,#experiment,#bigbang

November 16, 2020

Ultrafast 3d camera

This looks pretty impressive Physicsworld article on new ultra fast camera, 100 billion frames per second in 3d.

article

#physicsworld,#camera,3d,#100billionfps,#photography, #research,#science,#physics

November 15, 2020

Particle Physics course follow up

I am just following up on my OpenLearn particle phyiscs course review follow up.

As part of this I had to work out the charge spectrum on groups of 3 quarks.

This short article explains (or tries to) how to do this. Firstly thank to the course creators, Open Learn and the Open University without whom the course would not have been possible. Thank you also to users on the physics irc channel who gave me some help with doing this.

So if we take a Proton as an example, this has 3 quarks

uud

so firstly I had to write down all the possible combinations

uuu uud udu udd duu dud ddu ddd

There are repeated combiations here so by removing these we get

uuu ddd duu ddu

From here we then need to list the charges associated with each, and calculate totals

uud = 2/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 = +2e ddd = -1/3 + -1/3 + -1/3 = -1e duu = -1/3 + 2/3 + 2/3 = 1e ddu = -1/3 + -1/3 + 2/3 = 0

Now list the totals

+2e -1e 1e 0

if we put them in some sort of order

-1e 0 1e +2e

We get the charge spectrum

The activity had a sort of frurt machine that would come up with combinations of all the 6 quarks

u d s c t b

Details of where they fit in to the standard model and associated charges can be found on the standard model table.

Standard model

This may sound complex, which is perfectly fine, once it was explained to be, and someone worked through it, it was much clearer, I decided to write it all down, and then type up here, as this helps to reinforce learning.

Given there are 6 quarks, the number of different combinations of 3 quarks is huge. Then think there would be anti baryons, so the same combination but with antiquarks

Mesons have combinations of 1 quark and 1 antiquark.

#particle,#physics,#science,#charge,#spectrum

November 13, 2020

The Dawn of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

So on to another high end physics lecture

This is from the Institute of Physics

The Dawn of Gravitational Wave Astronomy – Berrill Stadium

#physics,#astronomy,#lecture,#gravitational,#waves

November 7, 2020

Enigmatic fast radio burst pinned on magnetised dead star

This is an interesting development, astronomers have found something they have been spending years searching for. Not sure where these stars appear on the The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54815687

The paper for this can be found on Physics World. Reported on IOPScience on 4th November 2020.

Currently discussing on a OU Science forum.

#bbc,#news,#science,#fsb,#space,#astronomy,#physics,#astrophysics.

August 18, 2020

Building Black Holes in a Lab

This is a really interesting video from PBS Space Time.

So if Black holes leak away mass via Hawking Radiation, does this mean that as white holes also exist, and expel matter rather than suck matter in. then are they also contributing to a mass reduction. This probably assumes the theory that there is a white hole at the other end of the Black hole, otherwise it raises questions as to where does all that matter go?

Further Study

Coursera offer several Physics Courses

References

PBS Spacetime

Further discussion

A thread asking about black hole mass loss via white holes can be found on Science Forums here if anyone would like to contribute to the conversation.

#space,#physics,#blackhole,#astrophysics,#astronomy

August 4, 2020

Physics news 4th August 2020

I asked about this on Twitter earlier. More to ask if I was right in thinking a dimuon was two muons together.

The full article can be found below.

CERN experiments announce first indications of a rare Higgs boson process.

Lots of interesting things happening at FermiLab then.

“US CMS is very proud to acknowledge the significant impact made by its members in deploying innovative analysis techniques, including cutting-edge AI methods, which were critical in establishing the evidence for Higgs boson decays into a muon and antimuon pair,”

It may be an idea to have an understanding, or a copy of the standard model of particle physics to hand.

This is also being discussed on the qoto discourse instance. Where there is also an updated standard model graphic.

You may also find Science Forums a good place to discuss.

This has also prompted me to try and figure out how to typeset the basic equation in LaTeX.

\$$H\longrightarrow \mu^{–} + \overline{\mu^{+}} $

So to quote the $\textit{news.fnal.gov}$ website

Please ignore the $'s at either side of the equation, these will be removed at some point.

Related Articles

#physics,#fermilab,#muon,#antimuon,#pair,#particles, #antimatter,#higgs,#boson,#decay,#science,#latex,#mu