Recent content by Galgenstrick

I was accepted to both UC Berkeley and UC Davis physics as a junior level transfer student with full scholarship to both schools. I will be accepting one of these schools offers as a part time student because I will be working 30 hours a week (I have a great job + stock options and I am not...

I do not know, that is why I am asking here before I try anything.

I have a power supply with an input of 115/230 VAC. There is no wall plug wired to it, just cut wires. I don't have much experience with this. If I wire this to a cord can I plug it into the wall (120 volts)?

I just purchased a HeNe laser with a power supply that came with it. I am not sure how to wire the powersupply to test the laser. There are 4 input wires, Brown, Blue, Green and white. The output is already plugged in correctly. I can take pictures if needed.

You are right, yes, it is 0.991, I forgot to change my K.E. to 1/sqrt(K.E.) before graphing. Thank you so much for your help!

The R^2 is 0.9599.

This is the original way I did this problem, but the large % difference between the actual half life, and the regression line's calculated half life was large enough to make me think twice (about 400%). Maybe I am thinking about this too hard, thank you for the reassurance.

The intercept would be the ln(A), so to find A I would just take e^ln(A). and B would be the slope. Would this be correct?

I get Y=B*x+ln(A) I am embarrassed to say I do not recognize this, besides it being a line.. If I were to guess here at what you are getting at, if I graph these values in log scale, and do an exponential curve fit, I would get a line. I tried this, and maybe it is correct. The R^2 vale is...

Taking the ln of both sides and simplifying, I get the following: ln(half life)=B/sqrt(K.E.)+ln(A) Is this correct? I did this by hand. Now if I do this, I can take the ln of my half life values in my data instead of graphing it in log scale? Am I on the right track? Thank you for helping by...

I am not sure I see how this would help. This equation is just used to fit the data, Y vs. X, in this case half life vs. K.E. of the alpha particles omitted. It might help if I include the data. here it is (sorry for the weird formatting): half life......KE (Mev) 138.4 days ......5.30 3E-7...

Homework Statement We are given a table of half lives of polonium isotopes and their corresponding alpha particle K.E. and asked to fit the data to the curve of : half life=Ae^(B/sqrt(K.E.)) to find the constants A and B. Homework Equations half life=Ae^(B/sqrt(K.E.)) The...

Which university is this? I am willing to transfer out of state / country

This is definitely true. There are so many cool things with physics. I am going to ask a couple of the optics PhDs at my work, and see what they think, they all did physics as undergraduate, however, 20 years ago there weren't as many specialization degrees available.

Right now I am a technician working with thin-film optics. I plan on doing something along these lines, other options would be laser engineering or spectroscopy or imaging technology. I love working on optical tables, I have experience with laser cooling, interferometry etc.