Everyone knows about the three states of matter, solids, liquids and gases. But few know about the fourth, plasmas. They’re all around us, from neon signs to TVs. And they could provide us with an unlimited source of energy. Eventually.
Tag Archives: physics
Plasma – the fourth state
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Ed Gerstner, fusion, ITER, NIF, physics, plasma, Resonance FM, science
Antimatter – Fantasy to Reality
By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, physicists increasingly realized that quantum mechanics provided a powerful means of describing the behaviour of subatomic particles. But until that point it only described slow moving particles. When Paul Dirac combined special relativity with quantum mechanics, he found something even stranger, antimatter!
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Tagged antimatter, Big Science, Chris Weaver, Dirac equation, Ed Gerstner, Paul Dirac, physics, positrons, quantum mechanics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
What IS a Higgs boson, anyway?
So what the hell is a hadron, and why are they colliding large ones to find a Higgs botswain?
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, CERN, Ed Gerstner, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, particle physics, physics, Resonance FM, science, Standard Model
Everything is Waves, Part Two
Quantum mechanics is by far and away the most accurate and successful theory that has ever been devised. It’s also the most bizarre. This week, Big Science continues to explore how the particle theory of light built to describe the light emitted by hot things leads to the weird world of quantum.
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Bohr, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, Heisenberg, physics, Planck, quantum mechanics, Resonance FM, Schroedinger, science
Everything is Waves, Part One
Quantum mechanics is by far and away the most accurate and successful theory that has ever been devised. It’s also the most bizarre. This week, Big Science explores how the particle theory of light built to describe the light emitted by hot things leads to a wave theory of particles.
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Bohr, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, Heisenberg, physics, Planck, quantum mechanics, Resonance FM, Schroedinger, science
Everything is bits
To a casual observer, the Universe looks likes *really* complex. It isn’t. In this show we’ll discuss how just a handful of building blocks and the idea of beauty (or, rather, symmetry) produces diversity and complexity in the world around us. From atoms and molecules to the opus of science, the Standard Model of Particle […]
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, CERN, Ed Gerstner, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, particle physics, physics, Resonance FM, science, Standard Model
Everything is light, Part Two
We took a bit of a detour last week, into ideas about warping of space and time, that we’d originally intended to put off until this week. No problem with that — science at its very essence is about taking unexpected detours. So this week, we going to try to go back to last week […]
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, light, Maxwell's equations, physics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
Everything is light, Part one
Wouldn’t it be nice if the laws of physics where the same everywhere in the Universe? What if they were? In episode one of BigScienceFM, we discuss the laws that govern electricity and magnetism, and how their universality leads to directly to the famous equation, E=mc2, the atomic bomb, and the large hadron collider.
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Tagged Anna Armstrong, Big Science, Ed Gerstner, Einstein, light, Maxwell's equations, physics, Resonance FM, science, special relativity
