Revision as of 08:28, 28 September 2017

Physics class 2017-2018

The year 2017 will be our first edition of a Physics Course in Wolverhampton, no doubt an historical event for the University. People who like to build and be part of something in the making from the very beginning, Welcome!

This page contains all the useful information relating to the 2017-2018—pioneering—edition. While most of the fastly moving, dynamically changing things happen in Canvas on a lecture per lecture basis, this space hosts the slower action that takes place at the deeper level that involves all the courses together. You should be pointed to it whenever your visit will be needed, but feel free to come back any time to consult any item of interest or see if things happen unnoticed.

Robert Hanbury Brown

The 2017-2018 cohort is named after Robert Hanbury Brown, the British astronomer and physicist who proposed in the 50s' and experimentally confirmed the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect, of correlations between photons. This great insight from an essentially unknown scientist (in fact, engineer) has been widely criticised by mainstream physicists when first announced, before its eventual recognition as a fundamental feature of the light-wave interpretation of nature, which gave birth to quantum optics. This is how he reminds the reaction from transposing to photons a demonstrated behaviour of light waves:

Now, to a surprising number of people, this idea [of photon correlations] seemed not only heretical but patently absurd and they told us so in person, by letter, in publications, and by actually doing experiments which claimed to show that we were wrong. At the most basic level they asked how, if photons are emitted at random in a thermal source, can they appear in pairs at two detectors? At a more sophisticated level the enraged physicist would brandish some sacred text, usually by Heitler, and point out that the number $n$ of quanta in a beam of radiation and its phase $\phi$ are represented by non-commuting operators and that our analysis was invalidated by the uncertainty relation $\delta n\times\delta\phi\approx1$.