Physics for the rest of us
Aug 7th 2006Wallabynerd alert
I’m a chemist. I’ve had a total of two years of physics classes in my life, one of which was in high school. Looking back, I could wish I’d taken a good bit more physics and math and less of the biology. What I remember of the latter is probably pretty well outdated by now, and somewhere along the way I seem to have lost the need to know about enzymes and stuff.
And now I’m hiding out in a lab that’s roughly half chemists and half physicists… and working mostly with the physicists. For every paper in J Phys Chem I’ve read in the past month, there’ve been at least three in Physics Review Letters or Optics Express. Interesting in a broadening-my-horizons sort of way (they do some really cool stuff in physics these days!), but definitely a stretch.
You know you’re reading a physics paper when…
- It begins “As described by Newton,1…”
- The *first* equation spans the entire width of the page
- The second page has more Greek letters than English
- Electromagnetic waves are described by frequency rather than wavelength, which is why
- You can make it to the last paragraph of the paper before realizing that the experiment involved microwaves instead of visible light
- “A moment’s thought will show that” my head will actually hurt for the next 45 minutes
- You go to look up a symbol, only to realize that you don’t own any books which describe it… nor do you know where to find them
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Feel free to add your own…
One Response to “Physics for the rest of us”
Dad on 07 Aug 2006 at 10:46 pm #
Obscure effects are named by the 19th century lad who discovered them, and referenced without explanattion or citation.
Q.e.d. is no longer merely a Latin abbreviation.
“It can easily be demonstrated” means about a day and a half- a ‘good’ day, that is. Sometimes never. The author was merely fairly sure of the matter, and didn’t want to spend the time working it out. Or, he knew it would take him 36 pages beyound the publisher’s limit–perhaps you could do it in less, and send it to him.
Many of the references will be JETP (in Russian) or Zeits. or Ann. der Physik, or maybe in Hungarian.
The obscure symbols will have been defined in a handbook (12 volumes) in 1926, in German.