Robotics

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

 

Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and others. Robotics deals with the design, construction, operation, and use of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, andinformation processing.

These technologies are used to develop machines that can substitute for humans and replicate human actions. Robots can be used in any situation and for any purpose, but today many are used in dangerous environments (including bomb detection and de-activation), manufacturing processes, or where humans cannot survive. Robots can take on any form but some are made to resemble humans in appearance. This is said to help in the acceptance of a robot in certain replicative behaviors usually performed by people. Such robots attempt to replicate walking, lifting, speech, cognition, and basically anything a human can do. Many of today’s robots are inspired by nature, contributing to the field of bio-inspired robotics.

The concept of creating machines that can operate autonomously dates back to classical times, but research into the functionality and potential uses of robots did not grow substantially until the 20th century.^[1] Throughout history, it has been frequently assumed that robots will one day be able to mimic human behavior and manage tasks in a human-like fashion. Today, robotics is a rapidly growing field, as technological advances continue; researching, designing, and building new robots serve various practical purposes, whether domestically, commercially, or militarily. Many robots are built to do jobs that are hazardous to people such as defusing bombs, finding survivors in unstable ruins, and exploring mines and shipwrecks. Robotics is also used in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as a teaching aid.

Robotics is a branch of engineering that involves the conception, design, manufacture, and operation of robots. This field overlaps with electronics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mechatronics, nanotechnology and bioengineering.

Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov is often given credit for being the first person to use the term robotics in a short story composed in the 1940s. In the story, Asimov suggested three principles to guide the behavior of robots and smart machines.

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, as they are called, have survived to the present:

1. Robots must never harm human beings

. 2. Robots must follow instructions from humans without violating rule 1.

3. Robots must protect themselves without violating the other rules.

 

[A still from ENTHIRAN (2010)

                  Depicting the possible threats from robots]

Optics

by Adarsh S.M(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/adarsh.asm.7

Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it.^[1] Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties.

Most optical phenomena can be accounted for using the classical electromagnetic description of light. Complete electromagnetic descriptions of light are, however, often difficult to apply in practice. Practical optics is usually done using simplified models. The most common of these, geometric optics, treats light as a collection of rays that travel in straight lines and bend when they pass through or reflect from surfaces. Physical optics is a more comprehensive model of light, which includes wave effects such as diffraction and interference that cannot be accounted for in geometric optics. Historically, the ray-based model of light was developed first, followed by the wave model of light. Progress in electromagnetic theory in the 19th century led to the discovery that light waves were in fact electromagnetic radiation.

Some phenomena depend on the fact that light has both wave-like and particle-like properties. Explanation of these effects requires quantum mechanics. When considering light’s particle-like properties, the light is modelled as a collection of particles called “photons“. Quantum optics deals with the application of quantum mechanics to optical systems.

Optical science is relevant to and studied in many related disciplines including astronomy, various engineering fields, photography, and medicine (particularly ophthalmology and optometry). Practical applications of optics are found in a variety of technologies and everyday objects, including mirrors, lenses,telescopes, microscopes, lasers, and fibre optics.

Particle physics

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

Particle physics (also high energy physics) is the branch of physics that studies the nature of the particles that constitute matter and radiation. Although the word “particle” can refer to various types of very small objects (e.g. protons, gas particles, or even household dust), “particle physics” usually investigates the irreducibly smallest detectable particles and the fundamental interactions necessary to explain their behaviour. By our current understanding, these elementary particles are excitations of the quantum fields that also govern their interactions. The currently dominant theory explaining these fundamental particles and fields, along with their dynamics, is called the Standard Model. Thus, modern particle physics generally investigates the Standard Model and its various possible extensions, e.g. to the newest “known” particle, the Higgs boson, or even to the oldest known force field,gravity.

 

Nuclear physics

Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions. Other forms of nuclear matter are also studied.Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the atom as a whole, including its electrons.

Discoveries in nuclear physics have led to applications in many fields. This includes nuclear power, nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and magnetic resonance imaging, industrial and agricultural isotopes, ion implantation in materials engineering, and radiocarbon dating in geology and archaeology. Such applications are studied in the field of nuclear engineering.

Particle physics evolved out of nuclear physics and the two fields are typically taught in close association. Nuclear astrophysics, the application of nuclear physics to astrophysics, is crucial in explaining the inner workings of stars and the origin of the chemical elements.

Acoustics

by Adarsh S.M(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/adarsh.asm.7

Acoustics is the branch of physics that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.

Hearing is one of the most crucial means of survival in the animal world, and speech is one of the most distinctive characteristics of human development and culture. Accordingly, the science of acoustics spreads across many facets of human society—music, medicine, architecture, industrial production, warfare and more. Likewise, animal species such as songbirds and frogs use sound and hearing as a key element of mating rituals or marking territories. Art, craft, science and technology have provoked one another to advance the whole, as in many other fields of knowledge. Robert Bruce Lindsay‘s ‘Wheel of Acoustics’ is a well accepted overview of the various fields in acoustics.

The word “acoustic” is derived from the Greek word ἀκουστικός (akoustikos), meaning “of or for hearing, ready to hear” and that from ἀκουστός (akoustos), “heard, audible”,which in turn derives from the verb ἀκούω (akouo), “I hear”.

The Latin synonym is “sonic”, after which the term sonics used to be a synonym for acoustics and later a branch of acoustics.Frequencies above and below the audible range are called “ultrasonic” and “infrasonic“, respectively.

Condensed matter physics

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

Condensed matter physics is a branch of physics that deals with the physical properties of condensed phases of matter, where particles adhere to each other. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by using physical laws. In particular, they include the laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and statistical mechanics.

The most familiar condensed phases are solids and liquids while more exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at low temperature, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, and the Bose-Einstein condensate found in ultracold atomic systems. The study of condensed matter physics involves measuring various material properties via experimental probes along with using methods of theoretical physics to develop mathematical models that help in understanding physical behavior.

The diversity of systems and phenomena available for study makes condensed matter physics the most active field of contemporary physics: one-third of all American physicists self-identify as condensed matter physicists, and the Division of Condensed Matter Physics is the largest division at the American Physical Society. The field overlaps with chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology, and relates closely to atomic physics and biophysics. The theoretical physics of condensed matter shares important concepts and methods with that of particle physics and nuclear physics.

A variety of topics in physics such as crystallography, metallurgy, elasticity, magnetism, etc., were treated as distinct areas until the 1940s when they were grouped together as solid state physics. Around the 1960s, the study of physical properties of liquids was added to this list, forming the basis for the new, related specialty of condensed matter physics.^[5] According to physicist Philip Warren Anderson, the term was coined by him and Volker Heine, when they changed the name of their group at the Cavendish Laboratories, Cambridge from Solid state theory to Theory of Condensed Matter in 1967, as they felt it did not exclude their interests in the study of liquids, nuclear matter, and so on.^[7] Although Anderson and Heine helped popularize the name “condensed matter”, it had been present in Europe for some years, most prominently in the form of a journal published in English, French, and German by Springer-Verlag titled Physics of Condensed Matter, which was launched in 1963. The funding environment and Cold War politics of the 1960s and 1970s were also factors that lead some physicists to prefer the name “condensed matter physics”, which emphasized the commonality of scientific problems encountered by physicists working on solids, liquids, plasmas, and other complex matter, over “solid state physics”, which was often associated with the industrial applications of metals and semiconductors. The Bell Telephone Laboratories was one of the first institutes to conduct a research program in condensed matter physics.

References to “condensed” state can be traced to earlier sources. For example, in the introduction to his 1947 book Kinetic Theory of Liquids, Yakov Frenkel proposed that “The kinetic theory of liquids must accordingly be developed as a generalization and extension of the kinetic theory of solid bodies. As a matter of fact, it would be more correct to unify them under the title of ‘condensed bodies'”.

Classical mechanics

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

In physics, classical mechanics, also known as Newtonian mechanics, is one of two major sub-fields of mechanics developed principally by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The other sub-field is quantum mechanics.

Classical mechanics is concerned with the set of physical laws describing the motion of bodies under the influence of a system of forces. The study of the motion of bodies is an ancient one, making classical mechanics one of the oldest and largest subjects in science, engineering, and technology, though textbook authors often consider Newtonian mechanics, along with Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, as the three main formalisms of classical mechanics.

Classical mechanics describes the motion of macroscopic objects, from projectiles to parts of machinery, and astronomical objects, such as spacecraft, planets, stars, and galaxies. Within classical mechanics are sub-fields, including those that describe the behavior of solids, liquids, and gases. Classical mechanics provides extremely accurate results when studying large objects that are not extremely heavy (i.e. their Schwarzschild radius is negligibly small for a given application) and speeds not approaching the speed of light. When the objects being examined are sufficiently small, it becomes necessary to introduce the other major sub-field of mechanics: quantum mechanics. This sub-field adjusts the laws of physics of macroscopic objects for the atomic nature of matter by including the wave-particle duality of atoms and molecules. When neither quantum nor classical mechanics apply and the objects are not extremely heavy, such as at the quantum level with high speeds, quantum field theory (QFT) becomes applicable. In case that objects become extremely heavy, deviations from Newtonian mechanics become apparent and can be quantified by using the Parameterized post-Newtonian formalism. In that case, General relativity (GR) becomes applicable. However, until now there is no theory of Quantum gravity unifying GR and QFT in the sense that it could be used when objects become extremely small and heavy.

The term classical mechanics was coined in the early 20th century. It describes the system of physics started by Isaac Newton and many contemporary 17th century natural philosophers. It is also built upon the earlier astronomical theories of Johannes Kepler, based on the precise observations of Tycho Brahe and the studies of the terrestrial projectile motion of Galileo. Since these aspects of physics were developed long before the emergence of quantum physics and relativity, most sources exclude Einstein’s theory of relativity from this category. However, a number of modern sources do include relativistic mechanics, which in their view represents classical mechanics in its most developed and accurate form.

The earliest development of classical mechanics is often referred to as Newtonian mechanics. It consists of the physical concepts employed by and the mathematical methods invented by Newton, Leibniz, and others. Later, more abstract and general methods were developed, leading to the reformulations of classical mechanics known as Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics. These advances, made predominantly in the 18th and 19th centuries, extend substantially beyond Newton’s work, particularly through their use of analytical mechanics.

Cosmology

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

Cosmology  is the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe. Physical cosmology is the scientific study of the universe’s origin, its large-scale structures and dynamics, and its ultimate fate, as well as the scientific laws that govern these areas.

The term cosmology was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount‘s Glossographia, and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosopher Christian Wolff, inCosmologia Generalis.

Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology.

Physical cosmology is studied by scientists, such as astronomers and physicists, as well as philosophers, such as metaphysicians, philosophers of physics, andphilosophers of space and time. Because of this shared scope with philosophy, theories in physical cosmology may include both scientific and non-scientific propositions, and may depend upon assumptions that cannot be tested. Cosmology differs from astronomy in that the former is concerned with the Universe as a whole while the latter deals with individual celestial objects. Modern physical cosmology is dominated by the Big Bang theory, which attempts to bring together  observational astronomy and particle physics: more specifically, a standard parameterization of the Big Bang with dark matter and dark energy, known as theLambda-CDM model.

Theoretical astrophysicist David N. Spergel has described cosmology as a “historical science” because “when we look out in space, we look back in time” due to the finite nature of the speed of light.

Mathematical physics

by Sandeep.P.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/sandeep.pd.71

Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The Journal of Mathematical Physics defines the field as “the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories”. It is a branch of applied mathematics but deals with physical problems.

Scope

There are several distinct branches of mathematical physics, and these roughly correspond to particular historical periods.

Classical mechanics

The rigorous, abstract and advanced reformulation of Newtonian mechanics adopting the Lagrangian mechanics and the Hamiltonian mechanics even in the presence of constraints. Both formulations are embodied in analytical mechanics. It leads, for instance, to discover the deep interplay of the notion of symmetry^{[clarification needed]} and that of conserved quantities during the dynamical evolution^{[clarification needed]}, stated within the most elementary formulation of Noether’s theorem. These approaches and ideas can be, and in fact have been, extended to other areas of physics as statistical mechanics, continuum mechanics, classical field theory and quantum field theory. Moreover, they have provided several examples and basic ideas in differential geometry (e.g. the theory of vector bundles and several notions in symplectic geometry).

Partial differential equations

The theory of partial differential equations(and the related areas of variational calculus, Fourier analysis, potential theory, and vector analysis) are perhaps most closely associated with mathematical physics. These were developed intensively from the second half of the 18th century (by, for example, D’Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange) until the 1930s. Physical applications of these developments include hydrodynamics, celestial mechanics, continuum mechanics, elasticity theory, acoustics, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, and aerodynamics.

Quantum theory

The theory of atomic spectra (and, later, quantum mechanics) developed almost concurrently with the mathematical fields of linear algebra, the spectral theory of operators, operator algebras and more broadly, functional analysis. Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics includes Schrödingeroperators, and it has connections to atomic and molecular physics. Quantum information theory is another subspecialty.

Relativity and Quantum Relativistic Theories

The special and general theories of relativity require a rather different type of mathematics. This was group theory, which played an important role in both quantum field theory and differential geometry. This was, however, gradually supplemented by topology and functional analysis in the mathematical description of cosmological as well as quantum field theory phenomena. In this area, both homological algebra and category theory are important nowadays.

Statistical mechanics

Statistical mechanics form a separate field, which includes the theory of phase transitions. It relies upon the Hamiltonian mechanics (or its quantum version) and it is closely related with the more mathematical ergodic theory and some parts of probability theory. There are increasing interactions between combinatorics and physics, in particular, statistical physics.

 

Usage Of Term

 

The usage of the term “mathematical physics” is sometimes idiosyncratic. Certain parts of mathematics that initially arose from the development of physics are not, in fact, considered parts of mathematical physics, while other closely related fields are. For example, ordinary differential equations and symplectic geometry are generally viewed as purely mathematical disciplines, whereas dynamical systems and Hamiltonian mechanics belong to mathematical physics. John Herapath used the term for the title of his 1847 text on “mathematical principles of natural philosophy”; the scope at that time being “the causes of heat, gaseous elasticity, gravitation, and other great phenomena of nature”.

 

Mathematical vs theoretical physics

The term “mathematical physics” is sometimes used to denote research aimed at studying and solving problems inspired by physics or thought experiments within a mathematically rigorous framework. In this sense, mathematical physics covers a very broad academic realm distinguished only by the blending of pure mathematics and physics. Although related to theoretical physics,^[3] mathematical physics in this sense emphasizes the mathematical rigor of the same type as found in mathematics.

On the other hand, theoretical physics emphasizes the links to observations and experimental physics, which often requires theoretical physicists (and mathematical physicists in the more general sense) to use heuristic, intuitive, and approximate arguments.^[4] Such arguments are not considered rigorous by mathematicians, but that is changing over time.

Such mathematical physicists primarily expand and elucidate physical theories. Because of the required level of mathematical rigor, these researchers often deal with questions that theoretical physicists have considered to be already solved. However, they can sometimes show (but neither commonly nor easily) that the previous solution was incomplete, incorrect, or simply too naive. Issues about attempts to infer the second law of thermodynamics from statistical mechanics are examples. Other examples concern the subtleties involved with synchronization procedures in special and general relativity (Sagnac effect and Einstein synchronization)

The effort to put physical theories on a mathematically rigorous footing has inspired many mathematical developments. For example, the development of quantum mechanics and some aspects of functional analysis parallel each other in many ways. The mathematical study of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum statistical mechanics has motivated results in operator algebras. The attempt to construct a rigorous quantum field theory has also brought about progress in fields such as representation theory. Use of geometry and topology plays an important role in string theory.