The beautiful language of tensors

You’ve probably heard the word ‘tensor’ before, but if you’re like me, you’ve gone through your entire physics degree without knowing what they are. So today, I’m going to express the relativistic wave equation in the language of...

Electromagnetism Part 2

Energy of a System The energy of a system will be the total worked required to assemble it. For example, if you wanted to make a system of two protons separated by a distance of 5cm (assuming you bring them in from infinity) the energy of the system will be the amount...

Electromagnetism Part 1

So, if you ever want to undertake a physics major at Monash University, you will probably want to take theoretical physics. Most of the course deals with Maxwells Equations and then applying them to matter, so that’s where we begin, after which we will then move...

Collapsing a wave function!

In quantum mechanics, we cannot speak of the exact location of a particle, but rather, we talk about the probability of a particle being in a certain region of space. Mathematically, we describe this using a probability density function, known as the wave function,...

Curl and divergence of a vector field

The Curl of a vector field is defined to be     The curl is a measure of the vorticity, or “swirliness”, of the vector field. So imagine that describes some fluid and has the vector field plotted below. Now this field shows that the fluid is...