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clickcrumbs
- How did you find PF?
- I'm trying to get a numerical understanding of the changes in rotation in this video: https://youtu.be/QFeG9CeeH88, and stumbled on this thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/angular-momentum-in-a-collision.782181/
Hello all, I'm glad to join this forum as someone who is coming back to an interest in physics in mid-life.
A year or two ago, I started reading the Theoretical Minimum series of books by Leonard Susskind and a few other authors. I'm nearly 40 now but got a minor in applied math when I was in college, so I find these books more interesting than wordier books about physics. I've been so interested, in fact, that I've started taking the intro physics for scientists and engineers sequence. I finished Mechanics last Fall, and am excited to start E&M this Tuesday.
For the final paper in Mechanics, I wrote about a scholarly paper which derived a simple expression for the change in one particle's kinetic energy after colliding elastically with a particle at rest; the author of this paper then used this expression to estimate the number of collisions needed to thermalize a neutron in a fission reactor (https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/10.0001629). Working on this really helped me see the broad applicability of mechanics and "simple" concepts like the conservation of momentum. Now I'm interested in the application of the conservation of angular momentum to the rotation problem in the video I linked above.
More generally, I can't wait to learn more about how all of this works within the electromagnetic field, of which I know little except half-remembered vector calculus from 2008.
Thanks for welcoming me and I can't wait to discuss topics like these and find other ones that drive you to do work on your own.
click crumbs
A year or two ago, I started reading the Theoretical Minimum series of books by Leonard Susskind and a few other authors. I'm nearly 40 now but got a minor in applied math when I was in college, so I find these books more interesting than wordier books about physics. I've been so interested, in fact, that I've started taking the intro physics for scientists and engineers sequence. I finished Mechanics last Fall, and am excited to start E&M this Tuesday.
For the final paper in Mechanics, I wrote about a scholarly paper which derived a simple expression for the change in one particle's kinetic energy after colliding elastically with a particle at rest; the author of this paper then used this expression to estimate the number of collisions needed to thermalize a neutron in a fission reactor (https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/10.0001629). Working on this really helped me see the broad applicability of mechanics and "simple" concepts like the conservation of momentum. Now I'm interested in the application of the conservation of angular momentum to the rotation problem in the video I linked above.
More generally, I can't wait to learn more about how all of this works within the electromagnetic field, of which I know little except half-remembered vector calculus from 2008.
Thanks for welcoming me and I can't wait to discuss topics like these and find other ones that drive you to do work on your own.
click crumbs
