If you are a newly admitted student planning to attend Richmond in fall 2009, please drop us a line! We like to stay in touch with potential physics and engineering students over the summer, to pass on information on course selection and research opportunities. (Probably only a couple of notes over the summer; we promise not to flood your inbox.) Please drop a quick note to Matt Trawick, and we’ll put you on our contact list. Welcome, class of 2013!
Archive for April, 2009
Last week all UR students doing original research had a chance to share their work with others at Richmond during the 2009 student symposium. As usual, the physics department was well represented, with nine students presenting posters of their work, on topics ranging from cosmology to biological physics. Afterwards, the Society of Physics Students organized “Sky Watch,” during which all of the symposium participants could get a taste of astronomy and see the night sky through telescopes.
Researchers tend to get very specialized, working mostly in just one area. But every once in a while, it’s fun for a researcher to work on something completely different. UR Professor Ted Bunn, who normally does astrophysics, just had an article accepted for publication that talks about biological evolution and its relationship to the laws of thermodynamics.
Believers in creationism and intelligent design sometimes say that Darwinian evolution is impossible, because it conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says, very roughly, that the total amount of disorder (or entropy) in the universe always increases, so, the creationists say, it’s impossible for the orderliness of life to arise spontaneously. This argument is wrong — there’s no conflict between evolution and thermodynamics. The point of this article is to explain exactly why it’s wrong.
