PHY197F

Oral Presentations

In the last week of the semester, we will not hold a regular seminar class. Instead, students will give a series of short presentations on a variety of modern physics topics. For now, all you need to do is to email me your top three preferences for what you would like to present. Once you have let me know your preferences, I will confirm your topic. Then you can start exploring your confirmed topic anytime after that, under my guidance.

List of some past topics

Please also feel free to try inventing your own topic!

1	How do ocean tides work?
2	What is known about extrasolar planets?
3	How do Star Trek/Star Wars tractor beams violate known laws of physics?
4	What causes the Doppler effect, and how does it differ for sound vs light?
5	What facts convinced Maxwell that electricity and magnetism are inherently related?
6	How does a microwave oven work?
7	Why is the Death Star in Star Wars science fantasy?
8	What are the Van Allen belts and what is an aurora?
9	Why did the bending of light by the sun experiment in 1919 make Einstein rock-star famous?
10	Why was the Physics Nobel 1993 awarded for binary pulsars?
11	What is gravitational time dilation and how does GPS work?
12	Why was the Physics Nobel 2017 awarded to the founders of the LIGO collaboration?
13	How do Star Trek wormholes violate known laws of physics?
14	Why was the Physics Nobel 1996 awarded for superfluidity in Helium-3?
15	Why was the Physics Nobel 1997 awarded for laser cooling and trapping of atoms?
16	Why was the Physics Nobel 2001 awarded for Bose-Einstein condensation?
17	What are nuclear fission and fusion, and why are they sources of energy?
18	Where do cosmic rays come from, and what happens when they bang into the atmosphere?
19	Why was the Physics Nobel 2015 awarded for neutrino mass?
20	What is the fate of our Sun?
21	What drives a supernova explosion?
22	Why was the Physics Nobel 2006 awarded for cosmic microwave background radiation?
23	Why was the Physics Nobel 2011 awarded for supernovae and cosmic acceleration?
24	What is the multiverse?
25	Why did Stephen Hawking concede a major scientific bet about black holes to John Preskill in 2004?