Measuring the local acceleration due to gravity (g) using a simple pendulum Background As objects fall towards the Earth, they speed up. Galileo’s surprising discovery was that the mass of an object doesn’t affect how much it speeds up (accelerates) as it falls. Rather, the acceleration depends only on the force that’s making the object […]

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Applications of Accelerators (outside of particle physics) Dr. Suzie Sheehy Research Fellow and 2010 Brunel Fellow Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 ASTeC Intense Beams Group STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory   http://www.suziesheehy.co.uk/ Accelerators: Where/Why? What can you accelerate? You can accelerate anything that has a charge such as protons, electrons and ions. Neutrons are […]

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Discovery Science with the Large Hadron Collider Professor Emmanuel Tsesmelis Directorate Office, CERN Department of Physics, University of Oxford   emmanuel.tsesmelis@cern.ch   Normal matter is made up of up and down quarks (found in protons and neutrons), electrons and electron neutrinos. The force particles include the graviton (which may be responsible for gravity), photons (responsible […]

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                        Rooks Heath College is privileged to have an ex-student, Alexander Ferrier, at Keble College Oxford studying physics. He began his four year Mphys degree in 2011. http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/

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Universal Gravitation: A History of Surprises   steven.balbus@astro.ox.ac.uk The language of gravity   The above left slide shows 1 = Newton (connected with mass), 2 = Einstein (space-time curves) and 3 = Feynman (focuses on electricity/magnetism and radiation is a fundamental property). The above right slide has the geometrical term with entries for pressure/momentum. R […]

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Introduction to Particle Accelerators                                                 Professor Andrei A. Seryi                                                                      John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science                                University of Oxford, Royal Holloway University of London and Imperial College London   andrei.seryi@adams-institute.ac.uk     An electric field (E) is defined as a region of space where a charged particle experiences a force. An example of a charged particle that […]

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Particle Physics: (More) Fact and Fantasy Professor Ken Peach    Professor Peach started his lecture by outlining what he said at last year’s lecture which happened before the famous announcement about the Higgs Boson. The above picture shows two things. The left hand side shows the equations of the standard model prior to the discovery […]

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The Discovery of the Higgs Boson – A Step Closer to the Big Bang With the recent discovery of a Higgs boson at the LHC and the inroads made in the understanding of dark matter and dark energy – 2013 is a great year to discuss the connection of astronomy, cosmology, particle physics and accelerators […]

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Curriculum Development in Physics: Then and Now what has changed – and what hasn’t Jon Ogborn Institute of Education, University of London Jon Ogborn, who with Paul Black led the Nuffield Advanced Physics Project, reminisced about those early days of curriculum development and about some of the unexpected ways in which things happened. He then […]

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Investigative Practical Work through the Extended Project Dr John Taylor, Rugby school Dr Liz Swinbank, University of York The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is a qualification equivalent to 0.5 GCE A-level that gives students the opportunity to explore a topic of their own choosing and, in the process to develop a range of research, critical […]

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