Hey guys. I think I have portrayed to you already that Quantum Physics is really strange. As in, not even quantum physicists understand it. Particles disappear and reappear through apparently solid barriers; particles and waves are interchangeable and zombie-living cats apparently exist (don’t worry, none of them have escaped into the world…yet). So welcome to another edition of: Quantum Physics is weird brought to you by The Aftermatter.

Today, we are going to be talking about electrons. The little charged guys that wizz around the atom and lead to the properties of ever material we will ever see:

Schrödinger’s cat is one of the most famous physics thought experiments. In this post, I will explain what the thought experiment is, the weird phenomenon it seeks to express and the origins of it.

So lets start with what Schrödinger’s cat really is. Erwin Schrödinger was a fantastic physicist in the 20th century. His influence spread across numerous fields, but he is best known for his work in quantum mechanics, even forming a whole new part, involving waves and which spawned the second most famous physical idea with his name associated with it, Schrödinger’s wave equation. But that isn’t what we are talking about today. Quantum physics is a very strange subject, we have talked about it before so I’m not going to go into much detail, but because of its complexity, there are many ways to interpret it. At Schrödinger’s time, the most popular was something called the Copenhagen interpretation.

Christmas is a magical time all around the world. Tomorrow night, millions of children will be putting out their stockings, ready to wake the next morning to delights delivered by the fat red man (and his reindeer) we all hold close to our hearts, St Nick himself, Father Christmas, Santa Claus. However, his one-night-only trip may just cost nearly the same as a luxury yacht, and that doesn’t include the presents!

In this post, we are going to be talking about how Santa will travel. I’m sure I’m not the only one that wondered about the logistics of one man, with a vehicle powered by flying reindeer, visiting every celebrating child in world so this year, I decided to actually look into it! We will be looking at the distance he travels, how much energy he needs and how much that could cost.

Now that we have taken a look at the brutal power of fission, lets take a look at its younger sibling. Nuclear fusion is a much newer idea than fission. It is not yet done on a large-scale and we cannot harness its energy properly, but it shows potential to be more useful, safer and easier than fission, so what is it?

Well in fission, we take one heavy thing and split it in two. Fusion is the opposite. We take two very light particles and push them together to make a new one.

In 1938, two chemists and two physicists made an interesting discovery. They bombarded Uranium nuclei with neutrons and found the nuclei split in two and released a large amount of energy. This was the first instance of a nuclear process called “fission” occurring in a lab. Now, this process produces 13% of the Earth’s energy. So how does it work?
There are two main types of ways for us to harness energy usually wrapped up in the nucleus of an atom. Today we will be looking at one, fission, and tomorrow we will be looking at the other. Before we go into specifics, lets take a look at what where all these things take place.

The universe is made of matter. Everything we see is matter. All we touch, smell and feel is matter. I’ve talked before about how matter is only 8% of all the stuff in our universe, but this week I’m going down a different route. Have you ever heard of antimatter? Well, antimatter makes up a fraction of a percent of all the stuff in the universe. However, it shouldn’t, in fact, there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter, but there isn’t. So what is going on here?

Firstly, lets define some things. What is matter? This, surprising, is pretty tricky to define. Matter is the name we give to parts of space with properties such as mass, in other words particles. However, not all particles are matter, and here we can describe antimatter.

Question: “If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?” by Harry Gething from Back To The Battle

What is your first reaction when you read this question? I’m sure a large amount of you who are only familiar with classical mechanics would have thought that they would work, but the light would just travel at the same speed as the car that is moving.  Those of you that are familiar with what we do here would realise for it to warrant a post, it just couldn’t be that simple!  So what is happening?  Well, for this, we have to bring in a new type of physics, relativity.

I am a big fan of a TV show called Doctor Who, I’m sure a lot of you will know it too, but for those of you that don’t, don’t leave yet! The show revolves around a character called The Doctor who travels through space and time in a craft called the Tardis. Every time someone new enters the Tardis, they notice something. From the outside, the Tardis takes the form of a circa 1954 police box, but once you go inside it is much bigger! Even for those of you that do not watch the show, there is some interesting physics that could explain this behavior, so stick around!

8 years after NASA asked for experiments and equipment for the mission, 3 years after the proposed launch and 8 months after the real launch, in August, 2012, we landed something on Mars. That thing was going to use its vast array of instruments to analyze all aspects of our closest planetary neighbor. That thing is a rover, and its name is Curiosity.

The mission has several aims, but its main goal is simple: to determine whether Mars has ever sustained life, or had the potential to sustain life. To do this, it is aiming to do several things.

• Gain a better understanding of radiation at the surface of Mars
• Investigate the mineral and chemical composition of Martian air and soil
• Discover the processes that have modified rocks and soil
• Investigate long-term atmospheric evolutionary processes
• Investigate the Martian water cycle and Carbon cycle
• Identify and analyse any organic compounds
• Investigate “building blocks of life”
• Identify any material that may be biological waste

Take a look around you. Anything you can see, the walls of the room you are in, the computer (or phone) you are looking at, even you, everything in you, is made of atoms. Little bundles of quarks and electrons. Lets zoom out a little. Look at the moon, atoms, look at the sun (don’t really, that is dangerous!), parts of atoms, everything you can see is made of atoms, or a least parts of atoms. So let me tell you something pretty amazing. Those atoms, and every other particle we have every discovered are only 4% of all the matter in the universe.

4 percent! That is a tiny number. So where is all the rest of it? Well, as it turns out, it just seems to be floating about the universe. The more complicated question is what it is. In fact, I chose to write about this because actually, we aren’t quite sure, but I will get to that later.