Hanbury Brown cohort

From Wolverhampton Light and Matter
Revision as of 10:55, 6 October 2017 by Laussy (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search

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 webspace hosts the slower action that takes place at the deeper level, involving 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

Hanbury-brown.jpg

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 $\delta n\times\delta\phi\approx1$.

Course rep

The "course rep" for the course of Physics is Chloe Allen-Ede. You can contact her at C.Allen-Ede@wlv.ac.uk.

Welcome week

Welcome-wondphys.jpg




Welcome to the University of Wolverhampton.

The most important part — On Monday 25 September, be in:

Be sure to have your "boarding pass" with you.

Click here for the welcome week program.


Academic calendar

2017-18-Academic-Calendar-wlv.png

Weekly calendars

And these are the weekly-calendars for Physics:

Physics-wlv-level-4-SEM1-2017-18-1.jpg Physics-wlv-level-4-SEM1-2017-18-2.jpg Physics-wlv-level-4-SEM1-2017-18-3.jpg

You can download them in pdf form: