Choose a Topic for my Physics Senior Seminar presentation.

[Jeff W]

I am giving a presentation and writing a paper on a topic of my choice in physics. The paper must be 4-7 pages long and the topic may be on any physics or astronomy subject appropriate for a 4th year Physics Major.

Please suggest interesting topics.

Thank you.

[istewart]

The motion vector of Alizee's ass.

[Piz0wn0reD!!!!!!]

super string theory.

[peachy]

god wish my sn sem paper was only 4-7pgs on WHATEVER i wanted!

[Alobar]

non locality

[jimdmcevoy]

Gravity Waves are cool. You can go into the maths as much as you want up to some nice wave equations derived from General Relativity. Or you can keep it maths free and still have plenty to talk about.

[daryn]

high-tc superconductors

[jimdmcevoy]

Dude, that is soooo boring.

"Here is a conducter with no measured resistivity. Blah blah blah blah....."

I don't get people's fascination with this. The physics behind it is a little bit cool, but there is much better out there.

[J.A.Sucker]

Ultrasensitive detection of explosives or other compounds. Some amazing stuff done. Look for some papers from Nate Lewis' group at Cal Tech. Very cool (and doable stuff). His talk was the best one that I've been to in awhile, and I see and work with all of the best.

Other topics I like:

Organic LED's

Single molecule detection

Light scattering (you can talk about why rubies are red and the sky is blue)

The infeasibilty of molecular electronics. Really, this is one of the easiest, and most interesting topics you could study. Look back at the report issued by several notable physicists (led by a bunch of Stanford profs) in response Hendrik Schon (Lucent) who claimed to make all of these single-molecule transistors. He was going to get a Nobel prize, but then people realized that he made up the data. The biggest scandal in science since Cold Fusion (there's another intersting topic, and a good book was written on the Cold Fusion debacle, called "Bad Science"). However, the Schon stuff was really amazing - he had the same graphs in several papers (verbatim) with non-sensical data in the first place. A really intersting topic for several reasons. First of all, SM transistors are a holy grail for nanotechnology, and studying them is interesting in itself. Second, Schon's scandal exposed several issues with high-competition science. Thirdly, this scandal was a final nail in the coffin for Lucent (Bell labs), and really killed the basic reasearch done in industrial settings in the US forever. This is perhaps the most significant impact of this whole thing. This is what I'd study. Plus, all of the papers will be easily accessible from your computer (most are in Science, Nature, Phys Rev Lett, and Applied Physics Letters) and you won't even have to go to the library. A slam dunk to be interesting, informative, and a hell of a presentation. PM me for more if you want - I have all the lowdown on it.

[jason_t]

Blue LEDs.

[daryn]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In risposta di:</font><hr />
Dude, that is soooo boring.

"Here is a conducter with no measured resistivity. Blah blah blah blah....."

I don't get people's fascination with this. The physics behind it is a little bit cool, but there is much better out there.

[/ QUOTE ]


i find it sad that you know people who are fascinated by this.

[jason_t]

Bell's Theorem rules.

[jimdmcevoy]

I don't. I am a nerd, I have a degree in physics, cause I think it's cool.

[MelchyBeau]

Mine was on electronics for the measurement of the parity violating in the N to delta transition. But it was also 25 pages.

Melch

[Uethym]

[ QUOTE ]
Gravity Waves are cool. You can go into the maths as much as you want up to some nice wave equations derived from General Relativity. Or you can keep it maths free and still have plenty to talk about.

[/ QUOTE ]

Winner. You can give a qualitative description of what gravity waves are, followed by a deep discussion of the instruments used to measure them, in a manner accessible at the high school level. Check out http://www.ligo.caltech.edu to see more.

(The fact that I work in this field is not biasing me at all...)

If you're really good, read about quantum teleportation and Jeff Kimble's group at Caltech. Then explain it to me.

[2planka]

Amorphous selenium coating of thin film transistors: applications for the medical imaging industry.

[jimdmcevoy]

Dude you work in this field? I hate to nerd it up on this thread, but do you know how/why the gravitons are quantized?

[-Syk-]

[ QUOTE ]
super string theory.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good choice. Do EMPs fit into the category?

[Uethym]

[ QUOTE ]
Dude you work in this field? I hate to nerd it up on this thread, but do you know how/why the gravitons are quantized?

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm primarily an experimentalist; I work on the LIGO laser and interferometer configuration. So I'm going to be much less useful for theory questions than if you asked me about optics or noise sources.

That said, I'm not sure I understand the question, but here goes. All the other forces we know of have quantized carriers, such as photons for the electromagnetic force. So it's not unreasonable to think that the carrier of gravity is quantized too, and from gravity's behavior we deduce some properties of that particle.

For example, you can look at the expected polarization of gravitational waves. They can't be monopoles, because that would require mass to appear and disappear, violating conservation of energy. They can't be dipoles, like electromagnetic radiation from an antenna, because that would require mass to oscillate back and forth in the absence of other forces, violating conservation of momentum (that's an oversimplification, but the end result is the same).

You can, however, have quadrupoles -- imagine two perpendicular lines, and as one stretches, the other contracts, and vice versa. Two astronomical bodies orbiting about their collective center of mass would produce waves like this. And quadrupoles are indicative of a particle with spin 2 (if I remember correctly), so we deduce that gravitons will have that spin.

You can also deduce a particle's mass from the range of the force and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: (delta-E)(delta-t) &lt; h-bar/2pi (you usually see it written in terms of position and momentum, but this is equivalent). Take the strong force; we know that this force has little effect outside an atomic nucleus. Figure out how long it takes for something moving near the speed of light to travel the length of a nucleus, and that gives you delta-t. Now from Heisenberg you can find delta-E, which should allow you to estimate the mass of the carrier of the strong force. This comes out to around 140 MeV/c^2, which is right about where the pi meson was later found, after being predicted by a similar argument.

Electromagnetism, on the other hand, has infinite range, so delta-t is infinite and thus delta-E is zero. Which is OK, since we know the photon is massless. But gravity also has infinite range, so we expect the graviton to be massless too.

This is no way answers your question, I'm sure...but it all sounds pretty spiffy, eh?

[Jeff W]

I thank everyone for your suggestions.

I offer special thanks to J.A. Sucker for your excellent ideas. I will look into your suggestions. Are you a professional physicist?

[J.A.Sucker]

I'm a physical chemistry grad student, soon to finish. Then I'll be Dr. Sucker.

[Zeno]

Damn your good. Stay away from poker J. A. Sucker. Science needs guys like you in a big way. In addition, that means I'll never have to stare at you over my large stack of chips in a no-limit game.

Hope all is well and the doctorate is getting wrapped up. Let me know when you defend.

-Zeno

[jimdmcevoy]

Thanks for the info, that is cool stuff. I've heard of these quadrupole moments before mostly in relation to a neutron star's orbit decaying and coliding with a black hole (which would produce the many high energy gravitons which you are trying to observe right?) but I've never learned the theory behind it.

[DemonDeac]

WHAT KIND OF SENIOR SEMINAR PAPER IS 4-7 PAGES?!?!?!
IM A POLI SCI AND PSYCH DOUBLE MAJOR AND WHEN IM A SENIOR I'LL HAVE TO WRITE A 100 PAGE PAPER FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE. IM A SOPHMORE NOW AND HAVE TO WRITE AT 15 PAGE PROPOSAL. 4-7 PAGES IS A JOKE. WHO CARES WHAT YOU WRITE ABOUT. IT'S CAKE.

[J.A.Sucker]

I hope you figure out how to turn off the caps lock key by the time that you write your thesis. In any event, a thesis of this length isn't really that big of a deal, and is a very rewarding experience. If you can't spend time to learn, critique, and write about something you are interested in, then you should just forget school. I wrote my senior undergrad thesis (150 pages) in a week. It was a tough week, but the final product was nice.

[J.A.Sucker]

Thanks Zeno. Science has never been more fun than lately; lots of good stuff going, and I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Should be wrapping up experiments at Christmas and defending in February or March, depending on how much golf I end up playing.

[Michael Davis]

Most people do not have the intelligence or supply of NoDoze necessary to write a 150-page physics paper, even a poor one, in a week.

-Michael

[jimdmcevoy]

I wrote a physics thesis in about 2 days, although it was a piece of trash and not 150 pages.

Depending on how many diagrams and lists of data a 150 page non-piece-of-trash thesis is doable I reckon.

[EliteNinja]

[ QUOTE ]
The motion vector of Alizee's ass.

[/ QUOTE ]

I second this motion.

Man, is everyone here a scientist?!
I'm in Materials Engineering (senior year).

[Chairman Wood]

I wish you would have asked a few months ago before I had my computer stolen. I took my senior seminar (I'm a physics major too) a few years ago. I am graduating this year. I had a twenty page paper that was allowed to be pretty general on Anti-matter. I had another one about 6 pages that was more specific on what spin effects in HE physics told us about the Standard Model. My advice to you would be just to pick up a Journal Article that seems interesting and start from there. Scientific American will have some pretty interesting articles and you could get a topic from there. After finding an article, check the references the author used for more specific material to write your paper.

[Jeff W]

Are you drunk or just an idiot?

This is not my capstone project. In my senior seminar we write short papers and present talks on topics of interest. These paper/presentations are excellent practice for large scale projects.

I don't know why you went berserk over my post. Okay, you have to write a 100-page paper. You're too cool for school. If your paper contributes anything substantive to political science, it will be the greatest miracle since the birth of baby Jesus. You wouldn't last 5 minutes in a Quantum Mechanics class before you drowned in a sea of Hamiltonians.

[Chairman Wood]

[ QUOTE ]
You wouldn't last 5 minutes in a Quantum Mechanics class before you drowned in a sea of Hamiltonians.

[/ QUOTE ]
I'm so ashamed that I laughed at that.

[Alobar]

[ QUOTE ]
If your paper contributes anything substantive to political science, it will be the greatest miracle since the birth of baby Jesus.

[/ QUOTE ]

heh, I just spit water all over my monitor :/

[peachy]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If your paper contributes anything substantive to political science, it will be the greatest miracle since the birth of baby Jesus.

[/ QUOTE ]

heh, I just spit water all over my monitor :/

[/ QUOTE ]

the rumors about u "spitting" r true!!! /images/graemlins/shocked.gif