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Putting The Fizz Into Physics

This effervescent volume is aimed at those naturally curious students, who are blessed with such enquiring minds that they delight in delving into things a little bit deeper than the norm. It presents a collection of six articles by the author, which first appeared in Physics Review, a UK magazine targeted at high school physics students. Each of these articles was subjected to rigorous review and was approved by an expert editorial board and advisory panel prior to its original publication. The members of the panel included Professor Stephen Hawking and Professor Sir Hermann Bondi. The subjects for these articles were specially chosen to add breadth to the high school physics curriculum by straying a little outside its conventional bounds. Equally, they have been presented so as to illustrate how the principles taught by physics can be applied to technical and technological topics to gain a deeper comprehension of the way the world works. In short, these articles aim to imbue the mental carbonation, so as to put the fizz into physics for students of all ages and backgrounds. The specific topics treated are: 1) A Brief History of Gravity – describing the origins of physics in the realm of astronomy and how the greatest physicists in history brought gravity down to Earth and ended up warping space and time in the process. 2) Of Time and Tides – explaining how the ebb and flow of tides on the beach has extra-terrestrial origins and how the same forces are causing the Earth and the Moon to drift apart and are exploding volcanoes on a satellite of Jupiter and once created Saturn’s spectacular rings. 3) Planetary Radiation Belts – illustrating how the simplicity of the force exerted on a charged particle by a magnetic field gives rise to exotic trajectories for radiation particles that become trapped in the magnetic fields surrounding some planets including our own. 4) The Physics of Nuclear Weapons – looking at the basic principles of creating nuclear explosions that are now in the public domain and showing that high

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