Welcome to PHY2053, Physics I

My name is Peter Hirschfeld

I hope you have not frozen your buns

It’s not very cold, compared to Yakutsk

 Welcome to PHY2053, Physics I

My name is Peter Hirschfeld

I hope you have not frozen your buns

It’s not very cold, compared to Yakutsk

“In Yakutsk, they close the schools when the temperature

falls below -13F…in the classroom”
What is physics?

Noooooooo!
Eagle nebula—Hubble space telescope
Interference pattern created by Co atoms on surface of Au
Collision of high energy proton-antiproton
 So physics poses questions and seeks answers
on many length scales

“Powers of ten”—from Nat’l High Magnetic Field Lab

Physics includes biology
and chemistry
 Lord Rutherford once said

“Science is physics…everything else is stamp collecting”

 Richard Feynman
once said

doing physics is like trying to guess

the rules of chess…

when you only observe

every tenth move!
We want to understand the rules,
or laws of nature, which apply to the universe,
but the universe is too complicated…

so sometimes we try to guess based on simple experiments,

like end games in chess
If a rule we guess after watching 100 moves turns
out not to work for the 200th move, we must give up
or refine our guess, and keep observing.
Nature has the final word.
That’s physics!