Fine Structure

It's the end of the first week of Physics 7B (E&M) and I've got open questions to my professor about triggering uncontrolled nuclear reactions (his doctorate is in nuclear physics) and superheating/cooling. The first topic was something I'd been curious about in the past while the second is something that I was wondering about during my adventure with <a href="#">homebrew particle physics</a>, triggered by our short in-class discussion about phase changes.

I'm fascinated by the ability to superheat and supercool water simply by denying it a place to grow bubbles or crystals (nucleation sites). These nucleation sites are simple, everyday things like chips or cracks in a container, or even it's particular texture. It would be more accurate to say that I'm fascinated by the fact that imperfections cause the transition and perfection delays it.

Open questions:

• Does nucleation get more and more sensitive to more subtle imperfections as the temperature rises past the traditional "boiling point" without boiling?
  
• How long can water last without nucleation points? Will it all vaporize at once at a certain temperature?

Here's how it'll work around here: I'll add questions as I think of them in this topic (or if anyone else suggests them... not that anyone can comment here yet) and I'll sum up the answers in their own post when I get them. This is the kind of post I expect to have a lot of around here so I'll add it to <a href="about.html">about</a>.

Actually, that's not really true. I'm keeping up with everything I can possibly comprehend about physics and although I can't claim to know everything (optional joke about never being able to know everything here), I keep running in to things that I wouldn't have understood 6 months ago. Ideally, this should continue on a timeline roughly consistent with, er, eternity. That's the goal, at least.

The interesting part about this is that I should really revisit some of the books with more technical bits that I read closer to 6 months ago. That means skimming 6 Easy Pieces to make sure I picked up on the important stuff and making a second attempt at 6 Not So Easy Pieces which was a little over my head 6 months ago.