59 posts on physics. All posts · RSS feed
The problem of predicting the term symbols for states derived from a atomic configuration (without using group theory!) provides a good use of Python's collections and itertools libraries. The function below can be passed the orbital angular momentum quantum number, , and number of electrons, …
The van der Waals equation of state for a gas is: in terms of the pressure, , molar volume, and temperature, . and are constants which depend on the gas, so it is often useful to recast this equation into reduced form: or equivalently where …
The Hamiltonian of a simple pendulum of mass and length may be written Or, dividing by the moment of inertia, , Contours of constant in the phase space are plotted below, with the contour corresponding to the separatrix highlighted. This is the value of corresponding …
The semi-empirical mass formula parameters used in the previous post were taken from the text book of J. W. Rohlf (1994) . Another, older set of parameters are presented in the compilation of A. H. Wapstra (1958) . Below we compare each with the experimental …
The binding energy of a nucleus is the energy that would be required to split apart each of its constituent protons and neutrons (nucleons). This energy is due to the forces that hold the nucleus together, which may be thought of as a balance between …
This article presents a Python script to map a spectrum of wavelengths to a representation of a colour. There is no unique way to do this, but the formulation used here is based on the CIE colour matching functions, , and . These model the …
The Wilberforce Pendulum is a mass suspended on a helical spring which is free to move up and down as well as to rotate as the spring coils and uncoils with its extension. You can see one in action below.
Matplotlib provides a function, streamplot, to create a plot of streamlines representing a vector field. The following program displays a representation of the electric field vector resulting from a multipole arrangement of charges. The multipole is selected as a power of 2 on the command …
The Lorenz system of coupled, ordinary, first-order differential equations have chaotic solutions for certain parameter values , and and initial conditions, , and . The following program plots the Lorenz attractor (the values of , and as a parametric function of time) on a Matplotlib …
