Introduction
I’m an experimental particle physicist and I work on one of the big particle collider experiments at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), the Atlas Experiment. We’re building new particle detectors after 10 years of upgrading the Atlas Experiment; we’ve got new technologies that we can put into the experiment to detect more particles, and more collisions. So, two or three years from now, we’re going to get more collisions with a better detector. At this stage we’re still operating with the old detector. I’m making sure we can collect good data so we can learn as much as we can from the proton collisions that are happening now.
What can students expect from this course?
It’s introductory mechanics. At some level, at least half or two-thirds of the material is what students would expect in a Grade 12 Physics course. It’s just taught with more sophisticated mathematical techniques. We start to use calculus more routinely – instantaneous velocities, instantaneous acceleration, and derivatives. Depending on how much calculus students have seen before, it might be more or less familiar to them. By the end of it we try to get into rotating coordinate systems, angular momentum, stuff that you might not have seen in high school physics.
What is your teaching style? What is your favourite part about teaching?
The thing I missed most during the pandemic was the ability to do some of the demonstrations. First-year physics lends itself more than any of the particle theory courses I teach to actually being able to demonstrate energy conservation, momentum conservation on air tracks, and things like that.
As an experimental physicist, that’s what I like most – just seeing how things work out and how things get conserved. You’ll see me trying to balance the air track to make sure it’s not tipped up or down, or the experiment doesn’t work.
But apart from that, it’s doing some examples, a few graphs from the textbook, and trying to work out examples on blackboard.
What do you hope to accomplish in this course? What do you want students to learn?
The goal is to get everyone on the same page. Everyone comes in with different levels of physics, depending on their high school. There might be topics such as conservation of momentum that are more familiar to some, but they may not have approached the topic in the context of calculus. This is important, because the rest of physics relies on calculus. Hopefully, students can learn to appreciate these familiar concepts from a mathematical lens, which is useful for other courses such as fluid mechanics.
What are some connections of physics and classical mechanics with your work/research or engineering in general?
In second-year EngSci physics courses, you learn about the applications of special relativity. There are generalizations to classical mechanics which are needed to understand general relativity. The concepts of momentum and energy conservation form the underlying theory for particle physics. In PHY180 we start from principles, rather than math, which are what we rely on in more advanced physics even if we don’t really know why.
Advice for students to succeed in the course?
Don’t underestimate the content even if you feel you know it! Sit and think about it and keep up with the new material. Do the online problems so you can check if you are absorbing the material.
Any other thoughts or comments?
The most important people to learn from are fellow students. Don’t underestimate what you can learn from talking and working with them.