The ads are really useful. (So are the Quick Studies, Back Matter, and articles in general. It's a great magazine.)
I grew up with Physics Today, too, and the ads really shaped my knowledge of available instrumentation before I even knew what that was.
I used to marvel that people would pay megabucks for what appeared to be a white box with three electrical connections, a power plug, and a power-on light. Now, when I read those, I'm like, "Your lock-in amplifier can do what?! Expletive. How do I send you my money?"
That’s great to know! The company I work for is considering a print campaign in Physics Today. We make some instrumentation - it’s good to know people actually look at the ads!
The market may be small, but people do read them. An interesting proxy for estimating the effectiveness of ads will be to look at the hiring section (which might be gone?). Physics Today now has more competition from online physics-jobs websites, though.
Mathworks has been sponsoring full-page ads with them for years, as has Hamamatsu. They must think they're getting their money's worth.
I look at the ads as a way to keep up with new developments. When SRS has a new product, or a small cryo vendor has a new doodad, it is a good way to see what's new. It does come up occasionally in a group meeting: "Hey, looks like you're trying to do X. I saw a thing in Physics Today that does Y, which, if you bend it funny, and add a line, is an X.... "
I assume they are targeted ads for physicists? I remember “fondly” the times when a website about kiteboarding would serve kiteboarding ads. Those were actually very useful. Now they are showing more blenders after I just bought one.
May I humbly recommend a terrific summary of the Davisson Germer experiment? [1] It is a great biographical summary of developing the experiment itself, with some experimental data not published elsewhere online of the electron diffraction phenomenon.
The design of the experiment is often as important as the result. It opens up a whole avenue of discovery as the same technique is applied to other problems.
My favorite article ever in Physics Today: "The Urinary Drop Spectrometer"[0], and a followup note ("Urinary Drops Again") suggesting an audio version[1].
"Information from the external urine stream permits early, painless diagnosis of obstructions with an optical instrument developed by an interdisciplinary group."
Japanese toilet models now have this kind of instrumentation, but the idea lay dormant for decades. I wonder if anyone has tried the audio version in the followup? Spectrometry on a stream of drops was hard in 1974, and relatively easy today. If I could avoid another kidney stone, I'd pee into almost anything.
My second favorite article in Physics Today, at the same time hilarious and chilling, was the transcription of a talk by Irving Langmuir of GE Labs in 1953. In it he gives a first person account of just how badly an esteemed scientist can fool himself. Consider it a brilliant example of Feynman's advice that you are the easiest person to fool. Of course, the same psychological process is going on in countless entrepreneurs as they convince themselves that they are on to the next unicorn.
Pathological Science: Certain symptoms seen in studies of ‘N rays’ and other elusive phenomena characterize 'the science of things that aren't so.’
They interviewed many famous physicists. Mostly autobiographical, but unlike in books, the interviewees don't have time to edit the answer, so the reading experience is generally better.
You wont understand how stuff "works" if you cannot solve problems, at least not in any meaningful sense.If you want a superficial knowledge (Nothing wrong with that) you have youtube channels or there are conceptual physics textbooks for non science majors.
I have to agree with this. There is no harm in absorbing qualitative accounts of various physics ideas, and that can be very interesting. But you won't really know what it's all about until you swim in the mathematical details. It sort of like listening to somebody describing programming, without ever writing a computer program.
Or like listening to a description of a song. The speaker might tell you the lyrics, even hum the various parts. If the song is simple (corresponding to perhaps simple and interesting facts about our solar system), vocals will give a good rendition of it. But if the song is intricate (like quantum mechanics), without the full band, all you are listening to is a hollow echo of the song.
I disagree. You can grasp the meaning of pv=nrt without memorizing the value of r. You can understand that electrons exist in probability shells without remembering what atomic number the d orbital starts at. You can understand that e=mv^2 is only an approximation that works at low velocities without being able to do a Lorentz transform.
> You can grasp the meaning of pv=nrt without memorizing the value of r.
Do you actually think that memorizing physical constant values is solving problems?And ,yes, anybody can grasp what PV= nRT means,but what about stuff like: "The average speed of the molecules doubled, what is the temperature now"."Derive the relation between pressure and height for an ideal gas and use it to estimate at which height the atmospheric pressure halves".Interesting stuff like that and not plugging numbers in a formula.
> you can understand that electrons exist in probability shells without remembering what atomic number the d orbital starts at
The d orbital "starts" at n=1. Hydrogen has d orbitals.You are confusing orbital existence with the occupation of them by electrons.
> You can understand that e=mv^2 is only an approximation that works at low velocities without being able to do a Lorentz transform.
The e = mv^2 you propose here is not an actual formula in physics. It is either Ek = (1/2)mv^2 in classical physics, so just kinetic energy, or E =mc^2+mv^2/(1-gamma^2)^(1/2) in special relativity. Which of course at low velocities is approximated by E= mc^2 + 0.5mv^2 the second term being the Ek as calculated in the classical theory.
I think your comment shows beautifully what I meant with my original assertion.
In all my undergrad and graduate level Physics, I don't think I ever used the value of R. The answer has nothing to do with the numerical value--that you can google. It has to do with knowing how to solve the problem.
Though having a grasp of the numbers can help with scale and the often forgotten "does that make any reasonable sense" check.
Solving problems doesn’t necessarily mean getting numerical answers. If you don’t know how to apply the equations you list algebraically then you don’t really understand them.
Like some people have said, learning physics is mostly learning how to think like a physicist. You can probably get the basic ideas from Wikipedia articles and popular books, but you won't really "get it" without some work.
I have a bias (a traditional physics education). But my advice to to supplement the popular stuff:
- Choose a career / hobby that is heavy in mathematical modeling. I find it much easier to explain physics to people who have built the intuition for applied math.
- Ask some questions on the Physics Stack Exchange.
Really great magazine, my wife used to have a subscription and it was consistently readable and fascinating to an 'educated layman' (maths and computing degree but no real physics knowledge beyond reading a bit and doing it at school).
It’d be great if we could actually archive this “archive”, but alas, it is behind a (temporarily disabled) paywall, which first requires user registration and login.
You will have to register to Scitation and the free access is only temporary.
> Scientists and students in affected regions can now register on Scitation.org to activate temporary free full-text access to content through April 30, 2020.
