conductors | ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies

Forces and Energy: Energy and Work

What do we mean by energy? Energy is the capacity of a physical system to do work or cause a change. We will examine what this means in detail below, but to help establish students’ baseline understanding of energy get students to do Activity 1. What is energy? Why is understanding energy important? When we design and build stuff important ...

Ask the Physicists: Swimming in a lightning storm

It is a dark and stormy…day. Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening. Mama Mia. And you are out swimming. OMG! Got to get out of the water and dash for the car. You are dripping wet as you dash to the car – lightning strikes the Earth everywhere. As you dash to the car, are you in greater danger from ...

Making metal stuff fly, levitation and the potential of superconductors

What follows is in answer to a question about whether we could make metal object fly without any help from engine-like things. If you live on Earth or anywhere that gravity exists, and you have mass (that is, you are made up of atoms and have weight), then gravity will always want to pull you toward the Earth. Actually, anything ...

FLEET Schools

FLEET Schools is a resource for primary and secondary teachers, and students to engage with physics and chemistry, and to learn and think about the research problems FLEET is working on. That problem is our ever increasing energy requirements coming from our rapidly increasing demand for computation. Think Internet of Things, AI, driverless cars, smart phones and gaming. To solve ...

FLEET schools: Conductors, insulators and electricity

Introduction From the dawn of time we have witnessed electricity as a primal force of nature in the form of lightning. The ancient Greeks would rub amber with a cloth and get small electric shocks – the same static electricity we experience when we rub our feet along the carpet and then touch something conductive, for example a metal bench ...