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The practical report is composed of a series of separate sections in which specific information is conveyed.
Your task in the report is to tell your reader all about the study you conducted, you do this through a number of sections:
- Title
- Introduction - what’s it all about?
- Method
- Prediction - What you think will happen…
- Theory Summarize the basic physics of your experiment. Include equations and other principle things the reader would need to know in order to understand the experiment.
- Variables - What will change - what stays the same
- Apparatus & Materials - what will you use to do what?
- Procedure -Describe briefly how you carried out the experiment. Do not include relatively trivial things like turning on a switch. On the other hand, you should include descriptions of how you determine things that are necessary to the anticipated results. This should be very short as well. Mention the particular pitfalls in data taking that you discovered and managed to maneuver around. You may need to recreate a wiring diagram or draw the apparatus in order to refer to it later during discussion
- Results - a neat table
- Discussion
- Analysis - hat’s the pattern in the results - gradients etc
- Conclusion - what do the results tell you?
- Evaluation - Are your results valid etc?
You should try to write your report as if the person reading it is intelligent but unknowledgeable about your study and the area of psychology in which it took place.
The marker will be checking to see that you have written your report with this sort of reader in mind. So, you must make sure that you have:
* provided sufficient background material to understand what you did and why you did it
* have spelt out and developed your arguments clearly
* defined all technical terms
* provided precise details of the way in which you went about collecting and analysing the data.
Putting the report into specific sections makes this task much easier than it might otherwise be.
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It looks like the first major investigation year 11 are to do is the resistance of a wire practical.
A few things to remember here guys:
As the above tells us, resistance, cross section and length are all linked and modified by a constant based on the material properties.
Our Control Variables then should be anything that isn’t resistance….
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On October 7, the Nobel Prize committee will announce their 2008 selection for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Leading contenders include Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester for their work on graphene, the thinnest material ever discovered, and Vera Rubin at the Carnegie Institution in Washington helping prove the existence of mysterious dark matter
Last years prize was awarded to A. Fert and P Grunberg for their work on giant magnetoresistance.
GMR as it’s known is a quantum mechanical effect, a type of magnetoresistance effect, observed in thin film structures composed of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers.
The effect manifests itself as a significant decrease in electrical resistance in the presence of a magnetic field. In the absence of an external magnetic field, the direction of magnetization of adjacent ferromagnetic layers is antiparallel due to a weak anti-ferromagnetic coupling between layers. The result is high-resistance magnetic scattering.
When an external magnetic field is applied, the magnetization of the adjacent ferromagnetic layers is parallel. The result is lower magnetic scattering, and lower resistance.
The effect is exploited commercially by manufacturers of hard disk drives.
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A log entry written by the current LHC co-ordinator at 11:27 am CET (10:27 am BST) states that there has been a “massive quench” in sector 3–4. Quenches occur when superfluid helium in the magnets rises above its operating temperature of 1.9 K, and can be caused, for example, when a proton beam veers off course.
According to the entry, firefighters were dispatched to that area of the tunnel. It also says that the vacuum in that part of the beam pipe was lost.
The latest thinking is that they will have to allow the LHC to warm up, repair it, and cool it down again. A delay of up to two months!
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At 10:31am (BST), Professor Brian Cox reports on the BBC Big bang day website that the ATLAS detector has detected it’s first beam.
This is what they saw:
ATLAS
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The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.
The report, ‘Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions’, published in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.
The group also writes, “Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists,” which is hardly a scientific reassurance!
The report concludes that, since cosmic-ray collisions are more energetic than those in the LHC, but are incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, we should not fear their creation by the LHC.
LHC collisions will differ from cosmic-ray collisions in that any exotic particles created will have lower velocities, but the Safety Assessment Group shows that even fast-moving black holes produced by cosmic rays would have stopped inside the Earth or other astronomical bodies. Their existence proves that any such black holes could not gobble matter at a risky rate.
“Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists.”
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Radio 4 are hosting a special day in honor of the LHC firing up at CERN on the 10th of this month. As I covered in a post (and podcast) earlier this is a pretty big, in fact the experiment is one of the most complex and significant of modern times - and one that raises a lot of questions!
Andrew Marr will host a special day of programmes and report throughout the day live from the Control Room at CERN.
There’s a list of programmes HERE, alternatively, find out more at The Big Bang Day website
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