The end is drawing near for Tipler and Mosca! Today I read two chapters: Solids and Relativity. There was an optional relativity chapter in the first volume, so that was mostly a repeat but always a good one refresher to get! More fun brain benders like the twin paradox and non-synchronous simultaneity. And a bit of general relativity too, which wasn’t in the first relativity section.
As far as the material about solids, that was interesting but also a bit difficult to follow because most of the math is hand-waved (too advanced for this text), so it becomes a bit abstract. There are a lot of interesting practical effects that are very important to the world today condensed into this chapter, such as semiconductors, transistors, etc. I had to laugh because one section talks about current technology and lists laptops and appliance processors as cutting edge. No mention of smartphones because, back when I got this book, smartphones didn’t exist yet! Yes, that’s right kids, the very first iPhone was released when I was in college. I got a BlackBerry Curve my senior year and thought I was fancy.
Over on the math side of things, I started the chapter on vector algebra. This was pretty easy, since I haven’t forgotten how to do vectors and they’ve been all over my physics textbook. Of course, Mathematical Methods manages to make topics that I already understand sound confusing, but I figured out what they were trying to say eventually. I can’t say I really understand the order that this book is going in, but that’s okay. I think it’s intended to be more of a reference than a book to work through, so I’m not using it in the most optimal way.
Today’s fun “new” fact: Superconductivity (a truly bizarre situation in which a material has zero resistivity and can sustain a current indefinitely without an emf source) is due to electrons forming Cooper pairs. Because the pairs act as a unit, they become bosons (integer spin) and are no longer bound by the Pauli exclusion principle. Although, as with most things in quantum physics, I believe this is more of a way of explaining it rather than a precise description what is actually happening.
(And as a bonus fun fact, Cooper pairs are named after physicist Leon Cooper, who is also the namesake of fictional physicist Sheldon Cooper on the TV show The Big Bang Theory.)