Physics

Week 0: Introduction
What we're trying to achieve in this course.
Imagine that it is ten years after you graduate. You may be an engineer, a scientist, or in
some quite different job. But let's say you have a problem to solve. This course aims to equip
you with some very powerful mental tools to help you solve that problem. Some of these tools
are specific bits of physics knowledge. But mostly, it's a different way of looking at the world.
This approach goes by many names - "Going to back to first principles", "Problem solving
strategies", "Modelling", and even "Thinking like a physicist".
Why does this matter? Because it will affect the whole future of the human race. Will the
future look like this:
Or like this?
Ninja Physics/Paul Francis
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Will science and technology continue to advance, leading us into an unimaginable
interstellar future, or will progress slow down and stop, leaving an overpopulated and polluted
earth to fight over finite resources?
Is scientific progress slowing down?
Many very respectable researchers believe that scientific progress is slowing down.
Others disagree.
Why might you think scientific progress is slowing down? We think that science is
advancing rapidly now - with such wonders as the internet, smartphones and DNA sequencing.
But compare them to the discoveries of 100-200 years ago, like radio, electricity, cars, jet
engines, artificial fertiliser and antibiotics. It's hard to argue that the recent changes have had
anything like such a big effect on peoples lives.
Why might things be slowing down? Possibly because science is becoming harder.
Galileo could revolutionise science by rolling balls across a table - nowadays it takes the multi-
billion-dollar large hadron collider, run by teams of thousands of researchers. You could argue
that the "low hanging fruit" has been picked. There were a certain number of scientific
discoveries which could rapidly be turned into very useful inventions - things like electricity
(light bulbs, telegraph, TV) and thermodynamics (steam engines, cars, jet engines). But they
were all discovered a long time ago - more recent discoveries like the standard model of particle
physics, or General Relativity, have had little or no effect on people's day-to-day lives. The
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number of scientists in the world keeps growing rapidly, yet the growth in economic productivity
due to science seems to be constantly dropping. The cumulative volume of human knowledge
doubles every ten years, yet humans are not getting ten times smarter or able to learn stuff ten
times faster every ten years - can our brains really cope?
On the other hand, there are people who believe that scientific progress is accelerating.
They point out that exponential growth (like we are seeing in computer speeds) has as increasing
effect with time. Doubling something that is already very large has a much bigger effect than
doubling something small. And even though the easier scientific problems have been solved, we
have much more powerful tools to help us solve future problems. An artificial-intelligence-
supported cyborg using quantum metrology can solve problems that would have baffled Einstein.
And we know that there is a lot more to learn because nature can produce marvels (like a
mosquito) that our technologies cannot even come close to matching.
So which is it going to be - science grinding to a halt, or accelerating into the future?
That's up to you. If you don't do it, as the scientists and engineers at one of the world's greatest
universities, who will?
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation - a book arguing the progress is
slowing down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Against_the_Machine - a book arguing the opposite.
Ninja Physics
In this course, we will be focusing on what I like to call "Ninja Physics", but is also
called "Back-of-the-envelope" or "Fermi problems".

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The basic idea is to very quickly come up with an approximate answer to a problem,
using lots of approximations and simplifications to get to the essential physics quickly. I call it
Ninja physics because it is very fast and very powerful, but often doesn't stand up well in the
light of day. It's an alternative to standard "Samurai" physics, which is also very powerful, and is
all about playing by the laws, but is much slower and more cumbersome.
Why do Ninja Physics?
It seems rather strange to deliberately make approximations. Why don't we just do things
properly and get the "right answer"?
Let's go back and think why we might need to do physics in the first place. We are
probably trying to solve a problem, or come up with some new technology to improve life.
So let's imagine that ten years from now, you have been given a problem to solve. It will
probably be a very difficult problem (top students like you won't be given the easy problems).
You will probably have no idea where to start.
That's where Ninja physics comes in. It allows you to play with ideas quickly, and get
your mind around what are the key factors. You can try out ideas and quickly see if they are at
all sensible. For even the most brilliant researchers, only 1 in 10 of their ideas turns out to work
(if all your ideas work, you are clearly having unimaginative, unambitious ideas). Ninja physics
can rapidly eliminate most of the ideas that won't work, allowing you to focus on the few that
will.
Once you've identified the idea or ideas that have a real chance of working, Ninja physics
helps you work out what factors are crucial to its success, and which are just minor details. You
can then focus your efforts on better understanding the most important factors.
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And only then, once you've found an idea that will work, and you've identified what are
the most important factors, is it time to put in the details and try to get a very accurate "right
answer".
Basic Principles
There are three basic principles of Ninja Physics:
Go to first principles
Build a simplified model
Focus on what matters most
What are "First Principles"? This means trying to understand the deep fundamental
reasons behind something. Often it means trying to understand a situation in terms of the most
fundamental laws of physics. It can mean asking "why" repeatedly, as you try to understand a
situation in terms of very basic principles.
What is a "simplified model"? Scientists and engineers can never calculate the full
complexity of any real world situation. We always have to simplify it somehow to make it
tractable. The trick is to choose the best simplifications - simplifications that make a problem
solvable but don't mean that your model is no longer like reality.
How do you focus on what matters most? To begin with, only worry about things that
would change your answer by more than an order of magnitude (a factor of roughly 10 or more).
At this stage, don't bother yourself about relatively unimportant things like factors of two, pi etc.
Once you are sure you have the big stuff nailed down, then you can start worrying about factors
of three etc.
I'll show you lots of examples of how to do all this as the course goes on!
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Week 1: The Physics of Normal Cars
Flying Cars
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously said "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140
characters". He was bemoaning what he sees as a slow-down in technological progress. While
there has been rapid progress in computers and smartphones, many other technologies like
transport and energy are advancing very slowly.

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(graphs from http://foundersfund.com/the-future/ )
Note the immense advance in computer chip power, and the complete lack of recent
major advances in either productivity or travel speed across the North Atlantic (though this
immense advance in computing power was only achieved by a vast increase in research
resources - http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/12/depressing-paper-great-
stagnation.html, and many think that this rapid advance in computing power is coming to an end
- see - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/26/vanishing-point-rise-invisible-
computer)
Flying cars would be amazing. They would solve congestion problems in our cities
(though they wouldn't solve parking problems unless they could fly themselves home after
dropping us off), and transform the way we live and the shapes of our cities. Countless science-
fiction shows have featured flying cars, ranging from Star Wars to Back to the Future. And yet
we don't have them. Every year or two someone claims to be on the brink of launching a
commercial flying car, yet it never quite seems to "take off".
Why? Is it just that researchers are being slack and unambitious? Or is there some
fundamental physical reason why flying cars are hard? And if so, what is this fundamental reason
and can we get around it some-how?

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This is a good job for Ninja physics - trying to understand what the fundamental physics
of a flying car might be, and see what, if anything, is limiting it. This is what "Going back to first
principles" is all about.
How can we go about analysing something like the feasibility of flying cars?
One approach is to try and figure out particular possible designs, and how feasible they
are. This is valuable, but it doesn't really give you a general answer to the question "are flying
cars feasible"?
In his situation, the best approach is often to "follow the energy". This can often give you
a very broad and general picture of what is and is not really important.
Coming up with a model
So how can we "go back to first principles" and figure out why cars are as efficient as
they are?
We need to come up with a simplified model of a car. A model that allows us to focus on
what really matters. Modern cars are incredibly complicated - if we tried to analyse every
component and how it works, we'd rapidly be lost in the detail. We need a simplified model.
We are going to follow the energy - so a good starting point might be to ask "Where does
the energy go"? We know cars need energy to move. Why?
Our simple model of a car might be a box on wheels that moves. To make things
concrete, let's imagine our car driving from Canberra to Sydney. Why would moving a box need
energy?
A few possibilities come to mind. The box needs to start and stop. When it starts from
rest and accelerates, it's gaining kinetic energy.

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Another possibility - friction. You will have to exert energy to overcome the friction of a
car.
But if you think about this, there will actually be two types of friction here. One is
"rolling resistance" - the friction between the wheels and ground. The other is wind resistance -
the force needed to push the moving box through the air. If you had a magnetic levitating car you
might be able to get rid of rolling resistance. And if you were driving on the Moon, there would
be no atmosphere and hence no air resistance. But on Earth, on wheels, both will apply.
There will also be energy wasted in the car - friction in the gears, heat dissipated in the
engine etc., but for the moment that's not part of our model - we're just going to consider what is
needed to get a box on wheels to Sydney.
Finally, the road to Sydney is not flat. Our car will have to overcome gravitational
potential energy every time it goes up a hill.
Let's consider these in turn and see which is most important.
Starting and stopping
How much energy does it take to accelerate a car?
Let's consider accelerating a car from 0 to 110 km/hr (110 km/hr = 110x1000/(60x60) ~
30 m/s). It must acquire a kinetic energy of . The mass of a typical car is 1-2 tonnes (1000-
2000 kg), so let's call it 1500 kg, so the energy needed is
So if you have to stop and start a few times, we'd be looking at roughly a MJ or two.
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Now this is a pretty approximate calculation. Different cars will have different masses
and will probably drive at different speeds. But this gives us an "order of magnitude" estimate
which is quite good enough for now.
Rolling Resistance
How about rolling resistance? This is caused by the tyres deforming as they touch the
road then springing back as the wheel rotates. Hard wheels (like the steel wheels on a train, or
the narrow high-pressure wheels on a racing bike) have low rolling resistance, while large fat
under-inflated tyres would have a larger value.
How can we estimate this?
One way is to think about how much force it takes to push a car along a flat road. As the
speed is low, wind resistance isn't important, so the force required is mostly just overcoming
rolling resistance.
Think back to when you've had to push a broken-down car, or watched other people do it.
It is clearly possible for one or two people to push a car along, but it's certainly hard work - the
people pushing are grunting and cursing. So the force needed to overcome rolling resistance and
push a car along is clearly close to the maximum pushing force a human can exert.
But what is this maximum force a human can exert? 1N? 10N? 100N? 1000N? 10000N?
Clearly it will vary from person to person and depending on the angle and direction of the push,
but we should at least be able to estimate a rough number.
For myself, I know I can lift up my kids, but not really an adult. When I go to the gym, I
can move ~30 kg weights but not ~100kg weights (you are probably fitter than me!) So an
estimate of the maximum force my muscles can exert is lifting ~ 30 kg, so a force of mg ~ 300
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N. I could estimate this other ways - e.g. from how fast I can cycle up hill, or from how heavy a
box I can push along the floor, but this is probably as good as any.
So this suggests that the rolling resistance of a car is around 300N.
Notice I've approximated g as 10 rather than 9.8. This introduces as 2% error, but almost
certainly that's the least of our worries here - almost certainly my estimate of a 30kg weight is
wrong by far more than 2%. And lifting a weight uses different muscles from pushing a car -
another possible source of error that is also probably much bigger than 2%.
How good is this estimate? One way to test it is to ask - could the answer be an order of
magnitude larger or smaller? Could we push a car with an order of magnitude less force - i.e.
30N rather than 300N? That's equivalent to lifting a 3kg weight - i.e. a large 3L milk bottle. I can
do that with one finger. I can't push a car along with one finger, so that's definitely too small.
How about 3000N? That is like lifting three people (100 kg) people. Only really strong circus
performers, Olympic athletes and superheros can do that. But you don't need someone like that to
push a car along a flat road. So that's too high. So it seems that to within an order of magnitude,
300N is probably about right.
If you look on the internet, you find that rolling resistance has been extensively studied
(of course), and is normally calculated as a fraction of the weight of the car. This fraction is
around 0.02 for typical car tyres, so the force is 0.02 times mg, or 0.02x1500x10 ~ 300N. So
both approaches match, giving me some confidence that this isn't too far off.
That's the force, but how do we convert this into energy? Well, energy applied to an
object is called "Work" and is equal to force times distance (as long as the force and distance are
in the same direction). So in this case we are applying a force of around 300N over a distance of
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300 km, so the work is 300x300,000 which comes out to around 108 J. So 100 MJ - two orders of
magnitude more than the energy needed to accelerate the car up to the speed limit.
So for this sort of drive, we can basically ignore the accelerating energy - it's irrelevant
compared to the energy needed to overcome rolling resistance. Though this might not be true for
urban driving where you aren't going a large distance, and where you have to stop and start a lot.
Drag
How about wind resistance (also known as drag)?
Experience suggests that it is important. Cars are designed to be streamlined. When you
stick your hand out the window of a car moving at highway speeds, the wind applies a strong
force to it.
So how can we estimate the drag force on a moving object, such as a car?
As an object moves through a fluid, it traces out a volume and all the fluid in this volume
ha to get out of its way. At low velocities, the fluid can flow calmly and smoothly around the
moving object (so-called laminar flow). But at higher velocities, the flow becomes turbulent and
the air swirls around in a messy way as an object pushes through.
Which situation applies here? The normal way to tell is to compute something called the
Reynolds number:
where is the density (~1.2 kg m-3 for air), v the velocity, L the length scale and is the
dynamic viscosity - a measure of how viscous a fluid is (around 2x10-5 Pa S for air). If the
Reynolds number is more than around 1000, the flow is generally turbulent.
In the case of a speeding car, L~2m (rough thickness of a car), v~ 30 m/s, so the
Reynolds number is around 2x105, well into the turbulent regime.

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In this case, we can crudely approximate that the fluid pushed out of the way of the car
ends up travelling forwards at roughly the speed of the car (actually swirling around in some
complicated pattern, but with roughly the same speed. Not all the air will do this, and not all will
be at the car speed, and we can allow for this by putting in a fudge factor, as we will see).
So we need to accelerate the swept up air to the car speed v. How much air is in the
volume swept out by the car? Crudely speaking, in a time t the car moves a distance vt, so the
swept out volume is equal to vt times the cross-sectional area of the car A. So the mass of air
swept up in time t is .
This air must be accelerated up to speed v in time t, so the acceleration is v/t. Using
Newton's second law (F=ma) this means that the car must apply a force
So the drag force is equal to the cross-sectional area of the car, times the density of air,
times the driving speed squared. Which all makes sense - you'd expect a bigger object to have
more trouble moving, and a dense medium would also take more effort to push it out the way.
And the great importance of speed makes sense too.

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In reality not all the air swept up is accelerated so much - some flows smoothly around
the car. But even air not directly in front of the car will be disturbed. To allow for all this, a
fudge-factor C, known as the drag coefficient, is normally used (and for various obscure reasons
a factor of 1/2 is also put in), so the equation for the drag force on an object moving at turbulent
speeds is:
Is this any use given it has an unknown fudge-factor C in it? Well luckily C is reasonably
constant for most objects at different speeds. For streamlined objects like most modern cars,
C~0.3. Incredibly streamlined objects (like solar racers and aircraft) might have C~0.1 or even
less, while trucks have C~0.6 and deliberately anti-streamlined objects like parachutes might
have C>1. But if you assume C~0.5 for most objects you won't be far wrong.
So what is this force on a car driving to Sydney? A Toyota Corolla is about 1.5m wide
and 1.5m tall. You can look up drag coefficients for cars (which come from wind-tunnel testing),
and they are around 0.3 for a car like a Corolla. So the drag force comes out at
1/2x0.3x1.52x1.2x302~360 N.
Which is about the same force we got from rolling resistance. So the energy needed to
overcome drag while driving to Sydney is also around 108 J.
So it looks at this stage as if rolling resistance and drag are roughly equal, while starting
and stopping is negligible in comparison.
Skin Drag
A small complication - this equation for drag depended only on the cross-sectional area
of an object, not on how long it is. In reality there is a bit of so-called "skin friction" caused by
the air sliding past the sides of an object, that depends on the length of an object. It is pretty
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irrelevant for this calculation, but can be important for long and thin objects like trains and
planes...
Hills
But how about going up hills? The road to Sydney is far from flat.
A typical hill might involve climbing around 100m. The energy needed to climb is thus
mgh ~1500x10x100 ~ 106 J. Which is a hundred times less than the energies needed to overcome
either the rolling resistance or the drag. So unless the route involves a lot of hills, this can safely
be ignored. And, of course, if there are uphill climbs you also get much of that potential energy
back when you roll down the other side of the hill!
Petrol Consumption
So, it seems that if you drive to somewhere like Sydney, the bulk of your energy is spent
overcoming rolling resistance and atmospheric drag, and your total energy consumption will be
around 2x108 J.
Let's double-check this. We know roughly how much petrol a car uses to get to Sydney,
and the chemists can tell us the amount of energy you get by burning a litre of petrol. So we can
work out how much energy a car really uses to get to Sydney and compare it to our estimate of
how much it should need!
Modern cars use around 7 litres per hundred kilometres in freeway driving (you can find
this figure on numerous web sites). Petrol contains around 3x107 J/L, so going to Sydney (around
300 km) uses 3x7x3x107 ~ 6x108 J. Which is roughly three times what we calculated.
That's actually very good agreement for a rough estimate like this! We got the order of
magnitude quite correct. And you would expect a car to be less than 100% efficient in turning
petrol into motion.

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In particular, a car engine is a heat engine - a device that burns petrol to create heat, and
then uses this heat to create motion. And ever since the 19th century, it has been known that heat
engines are fundamentally limited in their efficiency.
Any heat engine takes a temperature difference and converts it into useful work that can
drive motion. In the case of a car engine, the temperature difference is between the heat inside a
cylinder during a fuel explosion, and the outside air. It is possible to show using the laws of
thermodynamics that the most efficient possible engine uses the "Carnot cycle" and has an
efficiency of
where TC is the cold temperature (the outside temperature in this case) and TH is the hot
temperature (the temperature inside the cylinder during the explosion in this case). The
efficiency tells us the fraction of the heat energy that is converted into a usable form and can be
used to drive the car.
So to get an efficient car engine, you need to have the inside of the engine as hot as
possible. But if you make it too hot, you get two problems. Firstly, the materials in the engine
probably can't survive very great heat. But secondly, if the engine gets too hot, the fuel will
explode prematurely when it is injected - this is called "knocking" and tends to be the
fundamental limit in practice (diesel engines are more efficient because the fuel self-ignites here
so they can run hotter, without knocking).
If we assume our car engine runs at around 220 C (~ 500 K) and that the air outside is at
around 20C (~300 K), then the efficiency will be less than or equal to 1-300/500 = 40%. So
generating 6x108 J of heat will only result in 40%x6x108 ~ 2.4x108 J, which is very close to our
estimate of how much energy should be needed. The rest of the heat energy obtained from
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burning the petrol ends up as waste heat - the car's radiator will transfer this heat to the air
around the car.
Heating
It would be an interesting puzzle to calculate how much all this heat will warm up the air
around a road. So let's do it quickly (just for fun). One way would be to compare the warming
due to cars with the natural warming - say the sunlight. Sunlight deposits around 1000 W per
square metre (when the Sun is shining directly on the surface without too much cloud - this is
known as the solar constant). We'll need a surface area to work out the total solar heating. The
Hume Highway to Sydney is around 300km long. How wide is it? It has two lanes in each
direction, each of which is a bit wider than a car - let's say 2.5 m wide per lane, so the total
highway is around 10m wide, and hence has a surface area of around 300x1000x10 ~ 3x106 m2.
So the total power deposited on the Hume is 1000 times this per second - i.e. around 3x109 W.
Which is a lot!
Now we're trying to compare an energy per second (from the Sun) with an energy per car
per 3 hours. We could divide the energy from each car by the number of seconds in three hours
(3x60x60 ~ 104 s). Each car is burning 6x108 J over 3 hours (some of which goes straight to
waste heat, the rest goes to overcoming drag and rolling resistance, which ends up as heat), so a
car is heating up the Hume Highway and environs by around 6x104 W.
But that's just one car. How many are there on the highway to Sydney at a given instant?
One way would be to mentally picture the road an estimate how many cars there are in (say) a 1
km part of the highway. When I see a "turn off in 1km" sign, there might typically be around 10
cars between me and the turn-off. So if there are ~ 10 cars per kilometre, there would be around
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3000 on the whole Hume Highway, so the total power generated would be around 3000x6x104 ~
2x108 W.
Another way to estimate the number of cars would be to use the cars per second passing a
given point. Typically there might be a car passing you as you stand by the side of the road every
few seconds - let's say one car per 5 sec. At 110 km/hr (~ 30 m/s) that means there are around
5x30 = 150 metres between cars, which gives around 7 per km - close to what I estimated above.
So it looks plausible. Clearly if there is a traffic jam there could be a lot more cars per kilometre,
but then they probably wouldn't be going so fast and hence burning energy at a smaller rate!
So this is interesting - it's only ten times less than the solar energy. And that's assuming
direct sunlight. On a cloudy day, when there is heavy but fast-moving traffic, the heat from the
cars might rival the heat from the Sun. If it's a windy day this heat will be rapidly spread over a
huge volume, but on a calm still day or night, it may stay close to the road for a while, so you
might expect the road to be measurably warmer than the surrounding countryside!
Conclusions
Anyway - back to our main discussion - what is the energy budget of a normal car?
Remarkably enough, it seems that normal cars are pretty close to their theoretical
maximum efficiency. 60% of the energy is wasted as heat - but you can't do much better unless
you develop some sort of engine that runs very hot. The rest is split fairly evenly between
overcoming drag and overcoming rolling resistance. There isn't a huge amount wasted anywhere
else. Our calculations were pretty approximate, so maybe there is a factor of two missing
somewhere, but not a factor of ten.
So basically there is no way you could have a car that gets ten or a hundred times the fuel
efficiency of current ones, unless you could:

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Reduce air resistance by a factor of ten or more. An ultra-streamlined teardrop might improve
things by a factor of 2-3, but to do better you'd have to reduce the cross-sectional area -
say by having a narrow car (i.e. a tandem motorbike...). Or put the road in a tunnel and
pump out the air. Or have computer-controlled cars driving immediately behind each
other to take advantage of slip-streaming. But even if you reduce the drag to zero, that
will only double the fuel economy unless you reduce the rolling resistance.
Reduce the rolling resistance by a factor of ten or more. Rolling resistance comes from the
deformation of the wheels where they touch the road. Having narrower tyres with higher
tyre pressure will reduce that. The lowest rolling resistance is if you have metal wheels
on a metal track (i.e. a train...) and is about ten times lower than typically inflated car
tyres on a typical road. More realistically you could have narrow tyres with much higher
pressure (like road bicycle tyres). But that comes at the cost of lower grip and worse
cornering, and more wear and tear on the road due to the higher tyre pressure.
Increase the temperature of the inside of the engine to several thousand Kelvin. Which would
melt steel - but maybe some sort of silicon carbide fusion reactor (petrol wouldn't survive
at that temperature)?
So basically there are good fundamental physics reasons why we won't get cars that are
ten or a hundred times more fuel efficient that current ones very easily! We can expect
computers to get ten times better every few years but we really can't expect the same of cars
without either violating the laws of physics or doing something radical like changing them into
trains...
Lessons Learned
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The most important things I was demonstrating in these notes is not the physics of cars -
it is the Ninja physics approach I took. Here are some specific things I did which are important:
Don't worry about small factors and things that only make a small difference. So for example
the exact size and number of the hills en-route to Sydney - I just guessed and in the end it
made very little difference.
Often you end up comparing two numbers - say the energy used to overcome drag and the
actual combustion energy. This is very powerful.
Numbers matter - 108 and 107 J are very different things. Pay attention to numbers, not just
equations.
Simplify. Air flowing past a car doesn't behave as we said, but it will probably be close
enough that our estimate isn't ridiculous.
Go to first principles if you really want to understand something.

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Week 2: Flying cars
What's different with flying?
So now let us do a similar analysis with flying cars. Where must the energy go? And to
make it concrete, let's use the example of flying from Canberra to Sydney once more.
What is our model here? We need to work out how much energy is needed to fly. But
that's not simple - because flying involves several different processes. One is rising up to a
particular altitude, where the energy needed can be calculated using potential energy. This
energy will be the same whether you fly up, go up in an elevator or are fired up by a catapult.
Then to fly somewhere through the atmosphere, you will need to overcome drag (just like
a car on the ground must overcome drag).
And thirdly, you need to stay in the air while you get to wherever you are travelling.
We'll address these different processes in turn.
Flying cars have one major advantage over normal cars - no rolling resistance.
How about drag? If a flying car is roughly the same size and shape as a normal car, and
goes at the same speed, then the drag will be about the same.
There are a couple of possible differences here, however. One is that flying cars might be
able to go much faster than normal cars. However, because drag is proportional to v2, this will
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only make the energy consumption worse. So for the moment let's assume that a flying car goes
at the same speed as a ground car (~100 km/hr), but if we find the energy losses aren't too bad,
we can consider increasing the speed.
Another possible difference is that a flying car (if pressurised) could travel at a high
altitude, where the air is thinner. As drag is proportional to the density of air, this would reduce
the energy needed to overcome air resistance.
How thick is the Earth's Atmosphere?
So how thick is the atmosphere - how high would a flying car need to go to significantly
reduce the drag? We know that it's very hard to breath on mountain tops (4-5 km up) and nearly
impossible on top of Mt Everest (~ 9 km up), so clearly we are looking at heights of 5-10 km to
get above quite a lot of the atmosphere.
One way to estimate the height of the atmosphere is to use the air pressure at the Earth's
surface, which is a whopping ~105 Pa at sea level (we'll talk much more about air pressure and
where it comes from later in the course). The SI units of pressure are Pascals and are equal to a
newton per square metre. So that means that a cubic metre of air at the Earth's surface is exerting
a force of around 105 N per square metre on everything around it, including a column of air
going all the way up from that cube to the top of the atmosphere.
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As the column of air is not (on average) accelerating up or down, the forces on it must
balance. So the downward weight force, mg, will be equal to the upwards pressure force P. If we
make the (clearly wrong but useful) assumption that all the air has the same density as sea-level
air, around 1 kg/m3, and that gravity doesn't change much over the thickness of the atmosphere,
then the weight of a column with cross-sectional area 1 m2 is just the density times the height
times g - i.e. 1xhx10 and is equal to the pressure 105 Pa. So the thickness of the atmosphere must
be h~104 m = 10 km. Which matches our expectation from above.
In reality, of course, the atmosphere doesn't abruptly end at a particular height; it just gets
thinner and thinner until it is imperceptible. We will derive an equation for this later, but roughly
speaking, the density of the atmosphere halves every 5 km you go up. To be precise, the density
goes as
where is the density at sea level, h is your height, and H is the scale height of the
atmosphere, which is around 7km.

24
So if your flying car could go up 10km, the density would only be 25% that at sea level,
so the drag would be four times less.
Climbing energy
So is it worth climbing up to this sort of altitude? Or should your flying car stay near the
ground?
We already saw that the energy needed to climb a few hundred metres is negligible
compared to the drag. But if we want to climb to (say) 10km altitude, we'd use up mgh ~
103x10x104 ~ 108 J, which is comparable to the drag energy loss. So what we'd save in drag,
we'd use up in climbing.
So for the trip to Sydney at 110 km/hr, it doesn't make much difference. For
shorter/slower trips, it would make sense to stay low, as the climbing energy would greatly
outweigh the drag losses. But if you wanted to go further, or travel faster, then it would make
sense to get high.
Catapult?
So now we come to the crucial point - how can a flying car stay in the air? And how
much energy must it use to stay there? A car has weight (mg) which applies a downward force.
To stay in the air, this must be balanced by some upwards force?
Or must it? One possible way to fly would be projectile motion - you could fire a car out
of some sort of gun or catapult and just let it fly through the air like an artillery shell. Is this
feasible? Well - we know that it is possible to fire artillery shells out to distances of up to 30km
if you have a big enough gun (like the Amiens rail gun used by the Germans in World War 1).
25
(public domain image from the Australian War Memorial)
How feasible is this? Not very - guns like this fire their shells with supersonic muzzle
velocities (for the Amiens gun, around 700 m/s), so the noise of cars breaking the sound barrier
would be distracting, to say the least. Accelerating a car up to these speeds would need to be
done gradually to avoid crushing the car and its occupants with the acceleration. If we accelerate
at no more than g (~10 m s-2), it would take over a minute to get a car up to this launch speed
(700/10 = 70 sec) and a distance of
So a launch track 24km long! And the car would need to be very strong, heat resistant
and highly streamlined to withstand the supersonic atmospheric drag. And I've no idea how you
would safely land it at the end of its trajectory...
I suppose something much smaller scale might work - like firing cars over intersections,
but projectile motion for long distance flight doesn't seem very feasible.
Staying in the air

26
So it looks like we will need to supply some force to oppose gravity and keep our car in
the air. First of all - can we think of some argument to work out in a general way the energy
involved in staying in the air?
Energy used (work done) is force times the distance moved in the direction of the force.
So to hover or fly horizontally, theoretically no work needs to be done, because the direction of
the force (vertical) and the motion (horizontal) are not the same. And indeed this makes sense - it
is possible to hover in the air using no energy if (for example) you are suspended from a wire or
on a monorail.
So that's certainly one way to have flying cars - build elevated roads and drive along
them. In this case the normal force from the road keeps the car in the air and no energy is
required. But elevated freeways aren't quite what we had in mind when we talk about flying cars!
Another possibility would be to use buoyancy - suspend the car from a balloon or fill it
with hydrogen or some such.
Buoyancy
How does Buoyancy work? To understand this, we have to ask a very basic question -
why doesn't the air in your room fall down? Take a particular cubic metre of air in your room.
Any cubic metre will do. It weighs around a kilogram (similar to a water bottle). If you hold a
water bottle in the middle of your room and let go, it will fall. Why doesn't the cubic metre of
air? There must be some upward force balancing its weight.
What is this upward force? The air below our imaginary cube is applying an upwards
pressure to the cube. And the air above it is applying a downward pressure. The upward pressure
must be slightly greater than the downward pressure to balance the weight (about mg~10 N
27
greater, in fact!). Which is a very tiny percentage change, given that pressure at the Earth's
surface is a whopping 100,000N.
So the pressure of the atmosphere must decrease as you go up, to balance gravity and
keep the air from falling down. Later in the course we'll use this fact to derive an equation for the
density of the atmosphere at different altitudes. But for the moment, consider what this means for
the force on a solid object (like a car or a person) immersed in a fluid (like water or air).
There will be a pressure force on all sides of the object, but the force on the bottom will
be slightly greater than the force on the top. So there will be a small net upwards force. This is
called buoyancy.
How can we calculate it? Well, there is a sneaky trick:
Take an object immersed is a fluid (which has a pressure gradient). What is the net force
on it?
Very hard to calculate - I suppose you could write down some equation for the shape of
the object and integrate the vector pressure force over the surface - but sooner you than me!
But here's the trick - replace the object with an identical shaped bit of the fluid...
28
The laws of physics apply to any part of the world, so let's pick as our part of interest (our
system)this rather odd shaped bit of fluid. This bit of the fluid isn't going to move, rise or sink, so
the net pressure force on it must be exactly enough to balance its gravity.
So the net pressure force (i.e. the buoyancy) acting on this surface:
Must be equal and opposite to the weight of the fluid in this shape:
29
That's how you work out the buoyancy force - work out the weight of the fluid displaced
(i.e. the fluid that isn't there! The fluid that would have been there if the object wasn't there. The
buoyant force is equal and opposite to the weight of this displaced fluid.
So let's work out what it would take to get a car to fly by buoyancy. Let's have a balloon
filled with hydrogen or helium or something similar. To get a buoyant force capable of
sustaining a 1000 kg car (mg ~ 104 N), we would need to displace the same mass of air, i.e. ~ 103
m3 of air. Of course whatever you are using to displace the air (helium? Hot air?) would also
have mass, but the density of helium at atmospheric temperatures and pressures is about ten
times less than that of air, so we can probably ignore it for a quick calculation.
We won't fit 103 cubic metres of air in a car - at most a car's interior would be 2m wide,
2m tall and perhaps 4m long, so giving 16 cubic meters and an upward force of 16 times g times
the density of air - i.e. around 16x10x1=160N, which only contributes around 1.6% of the weight
of the car.
So really we need a balloon of some sort. How big? Well, it needs to displace 103 m3 of
air, so a cube 10m on a side would do. Probably a bit bigger because it would have to support the
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weight of the balloon, and because that gas inside is not zero density. So our flying car would
look something like this:
Hard to park - but perhaps not totally impossible?
But such a big balloon will have major problems with drag. If you remember, drag is
proportional to cross-sectional area times velocity squared. The cross sectional area has
increased from roughly 2x2 m2 (for the car) to roughly 10x10 m2 for the balloon - i.e. it's 25
times greater. So if you go at the same speed the drag will be 25 times greater - so the energy
consumption will be ruinous. Alternatively, you could go five times slower (i.e. around 30
km/hr) to reduce the drag by 52 and compensate for the larger surface area.
This all matches what we know about airships, dirigibles, blimps and zeppelins - they are
very large and very slow. So it's plausible.
Would a buoyant flying car be a sensible idea? The slow speed is a bit of a killer, except
maybe in very congested cities, where floating through the air at 30 km/hr may well be
preferable to sitting in a traffic jam below. Parking would still be a problem, but perhaps you
could develop some way to pump the air out of the balloon and stow it away when it's not
needed? Operating the flying car on windy days would also be tricky.
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Pushing air down
So if buoyancy isn't looking too good, how else would we generate a force to keep our
car in the air? The most common approach, used by planes and helicopters, is to apply a
downward force to the surrounding air. By Newton's third law, the air must therefore apply an
upward force to you, keeping you in the air. As you are applying a downward force to the air, it
will be accelerated downwards.
In a helicopter, the blades push air down, and the force needed to accelerate the air
downwards has an equal and opposite force upwards on the blades.
For an aeroplane, the wings deflect the airflow downwards, producing the required
downward flow of air, and hence the equal and opposite upwards force to keep the plane in the
air.
Note that an incorrect explanation of how planes fly is often taught in schools. This
wrong explanation says that wings have curved upper surfaces and flat lower ones, so the air
needs to go faster over the top. Faster moving fluid has a lower pressure (Bernoulli's effect) and
so sucks the plane up. But that explanation is wrong. Firstly, it assumes that the air going over
32
the top and bottom of the wing has to arrive at the end at the same time, which it doesn't. Not all
planes have curved upper wing surfaces, and stunt planes can fly upside-down (with the curved
surface pointing towards the ground) which is clearly inconsistent with this explanation.
So perhaps we could have something like this for our flying car - perhaps some fans
attached which blow air downwards and hence help keep the car in the air?
How much air?
So how much air would you need to push downwards to keep a flying car in the air?
Let's imagine we push a mass m down in a time t at a velocity v. How much force must
we apply to the air to achieve this?
Newton's second law tells us that F=ma, and we know that the acceleration is the rate of
change of speed - i.e. a=v/t. So the force we are applying to the air (which is the same as the
force the air is applying to us, by Newton's third law) is
where m/t is the mass pushed down per unit time. So basically we have a choice - we can
push a small mass down at a high speed or a large mass down at a slow speed.
Let's imagine we have four fans, one at each corner of the car, similar to many drones and
science fiction flying cars. We'll give each fan an area of one square metre. How much mass of
air can they push down?

33
The blue cylinders are the volume of air blown through each fan in time t - a cylinder of
cross-sectional area A and length velocity times time (vt).
The mass blown down per unit time is thus the density times the volume for each fan. So
for each fan.
To support a car (mass ~ 103 kg) with four such fans each of area 1 square metre, we find
that
so
The mass being pushed down per second is 4x1x50=200 kg per second.
So we can estimate the energy needed - the kinetic energy of the gas is
every second, so 250000 kW.

34
So - to get to Sydney, we'd need to stay in the air for 3 hours (3x60x60 ~ 104 s), so the
energy needed would be around 2.5x109 J!
If we remember, driving to Sydney required around 2x108 J, so a flying car of this design
would need around ten times more energy.
Feasibility?
So is this feasible? The very high energy consumption is certainly a problem. But we
could have said the same thing in the 19th century when people first proposed replacing horses
with cars. "They will use much more energy!" And they do. But much more energy was
available, thanks to fossil fuels, and cars took over.
So if we come up with some plentiful, easily stored, clear energy source (pocket fusion
reactors anyone?) then flying cars would certainly be possible. We'll come later on in the course
to the question of whether there are fundamental limits on energy supplies.
But if we're stuck with current energy supplies, this huge energy consumption is certainly
a problem.
But is there anything we can do about it?
Well - one thing to note is that the power needed to stay in the air depends on the time
you spent in the air. If you make your flying car faster, you don't need to spend so much time in
the air. If we go at around 110 km/hr, we use around 109 J to stay in the air and around 108 J to
overcome drag, for a total of around 1.1x109 J. But if we double our speed, we only need to stay
in the air for half the time, so our "staying in the air" power usage drops to only 5x108 J. On the
other hand, drag is proportional to v2, so doubling the speed increases the drag energy to 4x108 J,
for a total of 9x108 J. A little better (and a faster car is definitely good), but still pretty
prohibitive. Going faster still, and the drag becomes very big and makes things much worse.
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Perhaps we don't need to stay in the air the whole way to Sydney? You could drive on the
ground most of the way and only take to the air when there's a traffic jam, or to fly over traffic
lights. That might be feasible if you can make a car that can convert between driving and flying
easily.
How about the size of the fans? If you remember, the upwards force is equal to the mass
per unit second pushed down times the velocity it is pushed down. So we could have larger fans
and a slower speed, or smaller fans and a higher speed, and still keep our flying car in the air.
But the energy needed is proportional to mass times velocity squared. So if you have fans
that are ten times smaller but blowing the air ten times as fast, the energy changes by (1/10)x102
- i.e. becomes ten times greater, the change in speed outweighing the change in mass, because
the speed is squared.
So what this is telling us is that to minimise energy usage, it is best to push the maximum
possible amount of mass downwards at a lower speed. An ideal flying car would pull hundreds
of elephants downwards. Because they are lots of them and they are heavy, you wouldn't need to
pull them down fast, so your energy usage would be very low. An African elephant has a mass of
around 6 tonnes (6000 kg) so if you could push a hundred elephants down per second, m/t would
be 6x105 kg/s, so to support a car you'd only need to push them down at around 1.7 cm/sec, and
your total energy usage would be
So if there were large number of African elephants floating gently in the air between
Canberra and Sydney, you could have a flying car with large robot arms that gently pushed a
hundred of them down at a gentle pace every second, and keep yourself in the air with a power
consumption of less than 100 W (less than 106 J for the whole trip to Sydney).
36
But alas there aren't that many flying elephants around (probably just as well - imagine
all the dung, and how much farmers would complain when a flock of elephants landed on their
crops...). But the point remains true - if we could push more mass down, we'd only need a lower
speed and our energy usage would be less.
Helicopter?
One way to push more air down would be to have bigger fans. Consider a really large
single fan - i.e. basically a helicopter of mass M, with rotors of radius r (~ 5 m for typical light
civilian helicopters). Let us assume that all the air that goes through the disk traced out by the
rotor tips is pushed down at some speed v. This gives us a cylinder of air of radius r and length vt
pushed down in time t, very similarly to what we did for the flying car. So the mass pushed down
per unit time
and the upward force is
so
The power (energy per unit time) is

37
(i.e. it is proportional to r square and v cubed. But in order to generate enough thrust to
keep us in the air, we saw that v is inversely proportional to r. Put that in and we find that
So basically the bigger the rotor, the smaller your power consumption.
So if we want to reduce the power needed to keep our flying car in the air to around 108 J
(I.e. comparable to the drag and ten times less than our calculated value), instead of four fans
with areas of one square metre (so radii of around 50cm) we'd need four fans with radii ten times
as large - i.e. around 5m in radius. Or a single fan with a radius big enough to give the same area
as these four fans (10m). So it would look like a helicopter. But a helicopter with a rotor radius
around twice as large as typical civilian helicopters. And that's assuming 100% efficiency for the
rotor blades at pushing the air down that comes within the disk traced out by their tips.
Does this make sense? It suggests that typical helicopters would be at best around 2 times
less efficient that cars, and probably worse (they have to carry all that fuel and so would be more
heavy, and they need more safety features, a tail etc). Which sounds about right - helicopters are
clearly more expensive to run than cars, or everyone would use them, but not prohibitively more
expensive, as they are widely used by rich people, the military, and in emergencies.
Doing this calculation, it seems obvious that you should build helicopters with longer
rotors. If you can extend the rotor length of 10m they would be as efficient as cars, and if you
could go to 20 or 30m they would be an excellent method of transport (though too big to really
be described as a car and fit in normal parking spots).
Why don't we do this? I'm not sure, but a few possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, there
will be drag as the blades rotate, which we haven't considered. Long rotor blades have more
cross-sectional area and probably have to move faster at the tips in order to push enough air
38
down, so their drag will be high. If you make the rotors too long, the tips might need to go
supersonic, which would probably be a bad idea. Helicopters with longer blades will need larger
places to land, and the longer blades would presumably have worse aerodynamics and would
need to be stronger and stiffer to avoid snapping under the stress of operation. This would
probably be a good Ninja physics project in itself - what are the fundamental reasons why
helicopter blades are not longer?
Yet another approach would be to push down something heavier than air. One interesting
approach is "flyboards" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyboard), where you "fly" over water,
connected via a 20m hose to a water pump in a water scooter on the surface. This water scooter
pumps high pressure water up to you, which is then squirted out of jets attached to your feet,
allowing you to hover. Because the flyboard is squirting water (rather than air) downwards, and
the power source is on the water scooter and not the flying object, this is perfectly feasible and
energetically quite affordable.
You could presumably do this with a car, but it could only travel over water and would be
connected to a boat on the surface, so I'm not sure how useful it would be.
Aeroplane?
The most common way to push air down (and hence fly) is to have big wings which
deflect air-flow downwards. This is how planes work, and judging by how common they are, it
looks like they must be the most efficient for of air travel. So can we work out the key physics
here to see if this approach could work for a flying car?
The basic idea is that the wings deflect air downwards at some angle .
39
The aerodynamics of how this happens will be complicated, but basically air that passes
close to the wind will get deflected, while air passing further away won't. In reality things will
gradually shift from one to the other, but to make our estimate simple, lets just assume that the
air is either deflected (within height range h) or not.
So how much air will be deflected?
All the air in a slab of width W (the wingspan) and height h (the range over which the
wing affects the air) will be deflected down. In time t, the length of this slab will be vt, as usual.
40
Now let's guess that h is 10% of W - that sounds roughly right to me. And that the
deflection angle is about 10 degrees. Both these guesses are highly uncertain, so let's test them
using a known aircraft.
The calculation is basically the same as we've seen before, except that the lift force is
given by the vertical acceleration of the air, which instead of being mv/t, is . The
mass in the slab is
So the upward force is
We can use this to calculate how fast a plane must travel to be able to support its own
weight and hence take off:
Let's test this, using a known figure. According to the internet, the Airbus A380 has a
maximum take-off weight of 575 tonnes, a wingspan of 80m and a take-off speed of 150 Knots
(~100 m/s). But by our formula and making our assumptions, we get a take-off speed of around
190 m/s.
So the agreement isn't bad, but it looks like real planes do better than we estimated - if we
increase h to be 20% of W, and increase the deflection angle to 20 degrees, we get good
agreement.
So we can now use this (with our new values of h and the deflection angle) to estimate
what a winged flying car might look like. If we want to take off on a typical suburban street, we
41
will need a wingspan of no more than around 6m. Plug that in for a 1000 kg car and we find a
take-off speed of around 60 metres per second (216 km/hr).
Which seems a bit extreme to be practical. You could take off on a long freeway OK, but
you'd have to drive there first.
How about the efficiency? If you have a long wing, you would be directing a lot of air
down, so your efficiency is probably fairly good, but a short wing will hurt you here - you'd need
to go faster to direct enough air downwards, which would reduce your efficiency.
Conclusions
So what have we learned about the physics of flying cars? Is there a good physical reason
why we don't have flying cars?
Basically, yes. The only sensible way to stay in the air seems to be by pushing air
downwards. And for this to be reasonably efficient, you need to push a large amount of air down
at a slow speed (rather than a small amount at a high speed). For this to work, your flying car
needs to be big. There are basically three options:
Jet pack model - pushes a small amount of air down very fast. So incredibly inefficient, which
is why jetpacks have never really caught on.
Helicopter model - use rotors to push a medium amount of air down at medium speed. Still a
bit big to really replace a car, and still pretty expensive to run, but they do exist for rich
people and special occasions.
Aeroplane model - use wings to push a large amount of air down at a low speed. Efficient but
so large they need special facilities (called airports). Very streamlined to reduce drag, and
they take advantage of the thin atmosphere at altitude by flying high to reduce drag.
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As an interesting aside, this idea that to be efficient you want to push lots of air back at a
low speed is fundamental in the design of jet engines. The most efficient ones are so-called "high
bypass" engines which use a small turbine in the middle to drive a very large fan, hence pushing
a large volume of air back at a slow speed.
So it is really no mystery why we don't have flying cars - there are good physical reasons
why its very hard to have a car-sized flying machine that is reasonably efficient.
How might this change?
One possibility would be if we had some new cheap compact energy source, as we
mentioned earlier. Portable nuclear reactors would make many things possible.
Without that, what could we do? Our best hope comes from the fact that fans only burn
energy while they are on. We could perhaps have some type of car that only used fans briefly.
Perhaps it takes off using them but then deploys some long (efficient) wings to fly to your
destination. Most of the flying cars currently under development seem to use some variant of
this. Or you might drive most of the way on the ground, then only take off to skip traffic jams.
Are there some more radical solutions? Perhaps we could use something other than
"pushing air downwards" to keep our cars in the sky? Perhaps a car that swung from cables,
similar to Spiderman? Perhaps you could have water jets on the ground that squirt water up to
keep cars in the air? Generate really strong electric or magnetic fields and use electromagnetic
forces to keep a car up (it works for maglev trains but is very hard if you are more than a few
centimetres from the magnetic field source).
Here are some current attempts to build flying cars -
http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/12/30/14105960/flying-car-future-explained
Here's a NASA engineer's look at the possible science of feasible flying cars:
43
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110011311.pdf
Another quite different approach is to get 3D motion not by flying, but by going
underground...
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/inside-tunnel-elon-musk-already-digging-los-angeles/y
Lessons Learned
What new Ninja physics techniques did I use in this worked example?
Use general knowledge. When working out the thickness of the atmosphere, I used the fact
that you get short of breath on high mountains, combined with my knowledge of
mountain heights.
There is more than one way to solve almost every problem. And it's usually good to use
several methods as a check. So for working out the thickness of the atmosphere I used
two methods and compared them to a formula.
Compare to real-world situations. When working out the feasibility of a catapult, I compared
to the Amiens rail gun, while with flying I compared to planes and helicopters. This is
both a short-cut and a check.
Look at what equations depend on (e.g. force due to pushing air down depends on mass and
velocity) and use this to work out behaviour for different cases.
One word ("flying") may contain a myriad of different physical concepts (e.g. rising up,
hovering, buoyancy, blowing air down). Unless you tease them all apart with some hard
thinking, you'll be in trouble

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Appendix: Ninja Ticks
Orders of Magnitude
It is often hard to stop worrying about details and focus on the big picture. Using "Orders
of magnitude" is one mental trick that can help.
The order of magnitude of a number is that number rounded to the nearest power of ten.
So 1.7x103 would have an order of magnitude of 103. 9.6x10-4 would have an order of magnitude
of 10-3. When do you round up as opposed to rounding down? By whichever ratio is closest,
which means values of greater than the square root of 10 (~ 3.1) are rounded up, while values
below that are rounded down. So 3.5x109 rounds to 1010, while 2.7x109 rounds to 109.
Another way to think of this is rounding to the nearest integer logarithm (to base 10). So
log10(2.7x103) is 3.4, round it to 3, so the order of magnitude is 103.
We say two numbers have the same order of magnitude of a number if the big one
divided by the little one is less than 10. For example, 23 and 82 have the same order of
magnitude, but 23 and 820 do not.
-- John C. Baez
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Why do this? It forces you to focus on the biggest effects and ignore the details. And it
makes calculations in your head really easy. Once you've got a rough answer this way, if it is
interesting you can go back and add back in factors of 3 etc to get a more accurate answer.
And please don't take this as a set of rules to be followed. It's a helpful hint - but don't
take it too seriously.
Guesstimation and Bracketing
Traditionally an important part of Ninja physics was guesstimating numbers. This is less
important now with the internet - if you want to know the drag coefficient of a cricket ball or the
magnetic field of Jupiter, just look it up.
But often you need to estimate the order of magnitude of a number which you can't look
up, or you want to check that a number you got off the internet is roughly right (often they are
totally wrong).
Here are some tricks to help you estimate a number.
Compare it to something you do know. For example, if I asked you how tall a 10 story
building is (in metres) you probably don't have a figure off the top of your head. But you
know roughly how tall a person is (1.5-2m), so each floor must be a bit bigger than that
(2.5-3m?), so a 10 storey building will be something like 25-30m tall.
Geometric bracketing. Work out the highest and lowest plausible values and then take the
geometric mean. For example, if I asked you to estimate the width of Sydney Harbour,
step through orders of magnitude of distance and see what is plausible. Is a width of 1m
plausible? Clearly not - you could touch the other side. 10m? Still too small - that's
something like 10-15 paces, and it takes a lot more than that to walk over the bridge.
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100? Still sounds a bit small, but getting closer. Now let's try on the upper side. 1000km
is much too big - that's the whole way to Brisbane. 100km? That's bigger than all of
Sydney - if it was that big you couldn't see the other side. 10km - also sounds a bit big.
So we're saying it has to be somewhere between 100m (102 m) and 10 km (104 m). So
take the geometric mean, which is 103 m - one kilometre. And you're probably not too far
off.
Work backwards from its effects. Instead of trying to work out a number directly, work
backwards from what it can do. For example, how much energy is there in a punch? No
idea - but I do know that a really big punch to the chin can lift someone off the ground by
a centimetre or two. A person weighs ~ 102 kg, g~10, 1cm is 10-2m, so mgh ~10J.
Subdivide the problem. And keep subdividing until you have something you can estimate.
This is often done with a tree diagram - a diagram with branches, where you break down
each number into sub-numbers, which are themselves broken down. For example, how
many grains of sand are there on Earth? Here's one possible tree diagram for this:
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Convert to familiar units
Many numbers in physics and astrophysics are much too large, too small or too abstract
to easily interpret. This means that typically you will have no idea if they are right or not. If I
told you that a star had a mass of 1024 kg - would that look sensible to you? It's a big number,
stars are big - but the difference between 1020 big and 1024 big is like the difference between a
metre and ten kilometres - quite important! How about if I told you that a molecule was 10-7 m
big. That's a small number, molecules are small, but is it really sensible? Or if I told you that a
bar magnet produced a magnetic field of 5 T. Plausible? Or a person running at 10 metres per
second?
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One good way to check is to compare the number to something more familiar. Perhaps
change the units to something you know better.
Consider the runner. Is 10m/s a sensible speed? Most of us don't think of speeds in metres
per second. But if you convert this into km per hour, it comes out as 36 km/hr. Which seems
remarkably fast!
How about a molecule being 10-7 m across? You can compare this to the typical size of
an atom (which is something we derive later in this course, and which you can look up), which is
around 0.1 nm (10-10 m). So you can see that this molecule is around 1000 times bigger than an
atom. That's a big molecule! Might be OK if you were talking about some complicated protein or
long-chain polymer, but if you were telling me a water molecule was that big, you'd need to go
back and find out what went wrong in your calculation.
And how about a star having a mass of 1024 kg? Compare it to the mass of our Sun,
which is 2x1030 kg. Suddenly 1024 kg doesn't seem so big any more - it's two million times less
massive than the Sun. In fact it's ~ 6 times less massive than the Earth. A star that's less massive
than a small rocky planet? I think something must have gone wrong in that calculation!
Ratios
This is a very useful trick that is surprisingly rarely used by students.
Basic idea - let's say you are trying to work out some property, like the brightness of a
star or the amount of energy generated by a wind turbine. The equation to work it out is long and
complicated, and depends on several parameters you don't really know. So what do you do?
Often, you will know this property for some other case. So you might want to work out
the brightness of the star Vega, and you know the brightness of the star the Sun. Or you are
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trying to work out how power a 10m tall wind turbine near Canberra will generate, but you know
how much power a 5m high wind turbine near Adelaide generates.
In situations like this, you can often use ratios to get your answer very quickly and easily.
But only if you know how your property scales.
For a star, it is known that the brightness is proportional to the 4th power of the mass of
the star (with some caveats we won't go into here...). Vega is 2.1 times more massive than the
Sun. So Vega should have a luminosity 2.14 ~ 20 times greater than the Sun.
For a wind turbine, the power roughly depends on the square of the height, and on the
cube of the wind velocity. If the average wind speed near Adelaide is 30% greater than near
Canberra, then the lower wind speed should decrease the power generated by a factor of 0.73 ~
0.34, but the greater height should increase it by a factor of 22~4. So the total Canberra wind
turbine power will be 0.34x4 ~ 1.36 times that of the Adelaide turbine.
Swept Volume
This is a surprisingly useful trick that crops up all over the place in a wide variety of
situations - definitely one to have in your mental tool box.
You can use it if something is moving and you want to know what it will hit. Or if a fluid
is moving past an object and you want to know how much is going to interact with that object.
Or you are squirting out some fluid and you want to know how much you have squirted out.
The basic idea is to work out an imaginary volume (the "swept volume") which contains
everything you are going to hit or interact with. The amount of material you are going to interact
with in a particular time is the amount of material in this volume.

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We already used this method to work out the drag equation (by seeing the volume of gas
that will hit the front of a car) and the lift force due to fans (by seeing the volume of air blown
out by the fans).
The swept volume in a time t is equal to the cross-section area A times vt, where v is the
relative velocity of object and fluid.

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Chapter 7
Cameras
Why aren't Smartphone Cameras Better?
Smartphone cameras have become vastly more powerful over the last few years - they are
a major selling point for many phone buyers, and so the rival smartphone companies are
frantically researching ways to make them better.
They currently have two main drawbacks. One is lack of much zooming capability. If you
"pinch to zoom", your image rapidly becomes blurry and pixelated. The other is low-light
capabilities - often when you take pictures in low light conditions, they are very grainy.
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If we "pinch to zoom" on this image...
we start hitting the resolution limit - note that the writing is too blurred to be readable.
Why aren't cameras better? What's limiting their performance? Is there something we
could do to improve things? Let's see if we can figure this out.

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Note that this is of deep interest to astronomers. It would be great to be able to take
pictures of planets around other stars, photograph the aliens as they relax in their gardens. But we
can't with our current telescopes. Why can't be just build telescopes with more magnification?
This is also of immense interest to many other people, particularly the military. Huge
amounts of military equipment depends on various sensors, and it's crucial to understand their
limitations and what (if anything) can be done about it.
This is another example of "going to first principles". It will also introduce some key
ideas in optics, waves and quantum mechanics.
Digital Camera Basics
At its simplest, a camera consists of a lens and a detector (typically a Charge Coupled
Device or CCD).
The lens is made of some substance with a refractive index greater than air. When the
light hits the boundary between the lens and the air, it is deflected (according to Snell's law).
Optical designers will optimise the shape of the lens, using ray-tracing software, so that an ideal
lens should take the light from any given point on the object being photographed, and focus it on
a particular point on the detector.
Real lenses are more complicated - they typically consist of a whole series of bits of
glass, designed to give sharp images at a range of wavelengths, across the whole field of view,
but this simple model gives you the basic idea. Telescopes and the human eye work similarly.
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(exploded view of iPhone camera, showing the large number of nested lenses.)
If you need to, you can look up a large number of equations relating the distance to the
object, the focal length and the shape of the lens. But if we assume that the lens designers have
done their job correctly, the main thing we need to know is that a ray drawn through the centre of
the lens is not deflected - it continues in the same direction after passing through the lens.
Pixel size limit
The detector consists of a number of pixels. Whenever a photon of light lands on a pixel,
it has some chance of exciting an electron, creating an electron-hole pair. The electron is then
attracted to an electrode. When you read out the detector, the number of electrons is counted, and
these electron counts are used to make up the image.
What limits how much detail you have in your image? One limitation is the number of
pixels in your detector. Let's investigate this limit.Let's consider some light rays that pass
through the centre of the lens - they are not deflected:

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All the light that falls on one pixel is recoded only as being in that pixel. It doesn't matter
whether the light falls near the top of the pixel or near the bottom - that information is lost. So
this places a fundamental limit on how much detail you can see - detail that shifts where the light
falls on the detector by less than the size of a pixel is lost.
For objects that are a reasonable distance from the camera (i.e. r >> D, where D is the
diameter of the lens), the best measure of how much details you can see is the angle which
shifts the position on the detector by the width of one pixel.
So what detail size d corresponds to what angle and what pixel size p?
Small Angle Approximation
It is easy to get bogged down in trigonometry working this out, but luckily there is a
widely-used approximation you can use to greatly simplify this.
If you have a long thin triangle and you know one of the long lengths, what is the end
length? I show above three possible interpretations of this problem.
In the first, the triangle has a right-angle at the top right. L is thus the hypoteneuse and p
is the opposite. The ratio of opposite to hypoteneuse is known as the sine, so

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and rearranging:
In the second case, however, the right-angle is at the bottom, so L is the adjacent and p
the opposite. The ratio of opposite to adjacent is known as the tangent of an angle, so
And so
In the third case, p is part of the circumference of a circle of radius r. The whole
circumference would have a length , but the arc is only a fraction
of the whole circle, if the angle is measured in degrees, or
if the angle is measured in radians (there are two pi radians in a circle).
So if we measure the angle in radians,
So we have three possible equations for p (and you could come up with more - for
example dividing the triangle into two with right-angles in the centre.
Luckily, it doesn't make any difference which one we use, as long as the angle is small.
That's because of the small angle approximation - for , (try it out on
your calculator if you don't believe me).

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So let's use the simplest -
Angles
We can use this to work out the angle subtended by a pixel.
To be specific, let's use the camera in my smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S6. This uses a
Sony IMX240 sensor, which has a focal length L=4.3mm, and has 1.12 micron pixels and a f-
number (Focal length divided by the diameter of the lens) of f1.9.
So what range of angles of light will fall into a single pixel? P = 1.12 microns and
L=4.3mm, so
Radians are not a familiar unit to most of us, so let's convert this into degrees,
remembering that a radian is 180/pi degrees. It comes out as 0.0149 degrees - still too small to
easily comprehend. There are special units for very small angles:
An arcminute, which is 1/60 of a degree
An arcsecond, which is 1/60 of an arcminute.
This angle is just a little bit less than an arcminute.
Now what could we see with this. Let's say I'm looking at an object r=5 metres away.
What detail size d corresponds to this angle? Using the small angle approximation once more,
i.e. around a millimetre.
Is this right? Here's a picture of the far side of my office.

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Now if we zoom in on that old exam paper:

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You see that we can clearly separate out different words, but not really separate out
different letters. So a minimum detail size of around a millimetre is about right!
Limits to Angular Resolution
This minimum angle that allows you to resolve details is called the angular resolution: the
smaller the better!
So can we make it smaller (better) and see more details?
One way to do this would be to increase the focal length: remember that
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Indeed most dedicated zoom lenses are very long - and telescopes are much longer still.
But that won't easily work for a smartphone - you don't want a long lens sticking out the back.
So how about making the pixels smaller? Detectors are basically specialised silicon
chips, and the technology exists to make silicon components down to around 10nm size - 100
times smaller than the pixels in my smartphone. If you used a detector with pixels 100 times
smaller, wouldn't that be like having a 100 times zoom? You could take a photo of a book on the
opposite side of a football pitch and read the words!
What could stop this working?
One possibility is imperfections in the lens. If the lens is not polished to precisely the
right shape, some of the light may not end up where it is supposed to. But this is seldom the
major problem with modern high quality optics.
Another possibility is chromatic aberration. The refractive index of most glasses depends
on the wavelength, so a lens that focuses (say) blue light perfectly will probably not focus red
light very well, or vice versa. Camera designer try to overcome this using multiple lenses made
of different glasses, and mostly succeed, though it can remain a problem. And it introduces a
new problem - every time light passes from material with one refractive index to another, some
is reflected. The bigger the difference in refractive index, the more the reflection: for light
passing from a substance with refractive index n1 to one with n2, the fraction reflected is given
by:
which for light passing from air (n1=1) to glass (n2~1.5) gives 4% reflection. Have too
many air-glass reflections and you can be losing serious light, as well as getting ghost images
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from all the reflected light bouncing around. More expensive lenses have thin coatings on their
surface with intermediate refractive indexes, which minimise this loss.
Yet another possibility is that a lens has to be designed to take light from anywhere in the
field of view and focus it perfectly. It is possible to design a lens to focus light from one
direction perfectly, but being able to handle all possible directions is impossible. Designers use
ray tracing software - which sends imaginary rays of light from sources at different distances and
different directions though different parts of the lens - they try to optimise the performance so
that objects of all colours, at all focus distances, in all parts of the field of view, all give sharp
images.
Once upon a time, this was regarded as impossible. Back then, all lenses had spherical
surfaces, because of the way they were polished. By combining several spherical lenses you
could do a pretty good job of balancing all these requirements, but not a perfect one.
A few decades ago, however, Japanese optical designers decided that it was now possible
with computer milling machines to polish a lens to any mathematical shape they like, not just a
sphere. By combining several of these "aspheric" lenses, you can make extremely good lenses -
at a price!
So lens design isn't the fundamental limit, at least so far. The fundamental limit is
diffraction.
Huygen's Principle
To understand the diffraction limit, we'll have to stop thinking of light as little particles
(photons) that go in straight lines (rays), and instead think of it as a wave. Visible light is an
electromagnetic wave, with wavelength ranging from around 0.4 microns (blue light) to around
0.7 microns (red light).

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Now the funny thing about waves - they don't really move. Think of a water wave. The
wave moves, but the water only goes in little circles, ending up back where it started. If you pile
up water in some place and let go, it spreads out in all directions. And the same applies for
electromagnetic waves. If you have an appropriate electric and magnetic field in one location, it
will spread out in all directions.
Why then does light travel in a straight line? The answer to this comes from Huygen's
Principle, which says that waves spread out in every direction, but only move in the direction in
which all the peaks and troughs line up in phase.
Diffraction Limit
So - if you have an infinitely long straight wave, it will continue to move in a straight
line.
And if you have a point-like wave, it will spread out like ripples from a stone in all
direction.
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But what happens if you have a long straight wave but it had to go through a hole (like a
lens) so it is still straight, but is now short. What happens then?
Consider the spherical waves from the top and bottom of the hole. Going straight ahead,
they add up in phase - peaks like up with peaks, so the wave definitely goes that way. But if we
shift the angle a little bit, do they still add up in phase?

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If you look at the waves going off at an angle , the wave from the top has to go an extra
distance .
If this extra distance is comparable to the wavelength , then the waves from top and
bottom (and all the places in-between) will not all line up - there will be destructive interference,
but if , the waves will mostly add up in phase, so you will get a strong signal.
This means that light going through an aperture of size D will spread out over an angle of
roughly
(measured in radians).
And this really happens:

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The narrower the slit, or the longer the wavelength, the more the waves will spread out.
This is called diffraction.

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Camera Diffraction Limit
So what is this diffraction limit for a smartphone camera?
For my Samsung, the lens diameter is 2.26mm. For visible light, the wavelength is
around 5x10-7 m. So the diffraction limit:
Now if you remember, that was about the angle subtended by the pixels.
So this tells us that diffraction spreads out the light coming in a given direction by about
the width of a pixel - so the limit due to the pixel size and the limit due to diffraction are about
the same.
This is not a coincidence - there would be no point in having smaller pixels, because
diffraction would just spread the light over more of them - you wouldn't see any more detail.
This is why most smartphone cameras have ~ 1 micron pixel sizes: given their short focal
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lengths, there is no point in having smaller ones, as diffraction would blur your image anyway by
this amount.
How could we avoid this limit? The obvious way is to have a wider lens (larger D). But
that would make the camera larger and harder to fit in a smartphone. It is really hard to design a
set of lenses whose focal length is less than its diameter, and still get a good image quality
everywhere.
Most professional photographers who need to zoom in a lot (like wildlife photographers)
will have very big and very wide zoom lenses.
Astronomers, who need to zoom in even more, use really big telescopes!
The other alternative is to use shorter wavelengths. If you took a picture at ultra-violet
wavelengths (~ 0.3 microns) it could be twice as sharp. But nobody really wants to see what
things look like in the ultra-violet, so that's not very useful for commercial cameras (and light
with wavelengths less than around 0.32nm cant penetrate the ozone layer).
Magnification
People often ask what "magnification" a camera or telescope has.
Magnification can mean different things. If you take a small photo and photocopy it up to
the size of a poster, the magnification is enormous. But you won't see any more detail in the big
print than in the small - probably less, in practice.
So what really matters is not how big an image is, but how much detail you can pick out.
This is called the angular resolution.
We've seen that good smartphone cameras have angular resolutions of around 2x10-4
radians. How does this compare with the human eye?

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I just drew two dots on a piece of paper, roughly one mm apart. I propped the piece of
paper up on my desk, and then walked backwards, still looking at the two dots. I wanted to see
how far back I could go and still pick out the fact that there were two dots, not just one. The
answer was about 5m. Similarly, I can just about read printed material in a letter out to a few
metre distance.
So the angular resolution of my eye is roughly 1mm/5m ~ 2x10-4 m ~ 1 arcminute. Worse
if you need glasses.
So this means that the resolution of a good modern smartphone camera is about the same
as the human eye. So if you like, you can say that these cameras have a magnification of one -
you see the same level of detail as you would by eye.
Photons
So we've seen that the wave nature of light places a fairly severe limit on the angular
resolution of smartphone cameras. You can't zoom in just by having smaller pixels - they would
just give you a larger blurrier image, with no more detail visible.
Now how about the other challenge to smartphone photography - low light performance?
If you take pictures in dim conditions, they usually come out grainy, and sometimes completely
black. Why is this? Why do cameras need lots of light to take pictures?
To understand this, we need to think about light as particles - photons, rather than as
waves. Light is in reality both a wave and a particle, and mind-bending quantum mechanical
weirdness that we will cover later in this course. To understand diffraction, you have to think of
light as a wave, but to understand the limitations of low-light photography, you have to think of
light as a particle.
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Quantum mechanics tells us that the energy of an individual quantum of light (a photon)
is , where h is Planck's constant 6.63x10-34 m2 kg s-1, and (nu) is the frequency.
What is the frequency of visible light?
For any wave, its speed is equal to its frequency times its wavelength. Why? Imagine
watching a wave go past. You count waves going past each second, each of wavelength . So
the total length of light-wave that has gone past must be , and is equal to the speed of the
wave.
So for light, which always travels at the speed of light (duh) in a vacuum,
Visible light has a wavelength of around 5.5x10-7 m, and c=3x108 m/s, so we calculate a
frequency of around 5.5x1014 Hz. Extremely high!
If we multiply this by Planck's constant, we find that each visible light photon has an
energy of around 3.6x10-19 J. Not big.
Lightbulb Power
OK - we've seen that photons are pretty weak. But how many of them would you get in a
typical low-light photography situation?
What is a typical photographically challenging situation? I imagine trying to take a
picture of someone in my garden, lit only by the light-bulb on our porch, which is around 10m
away. I know from experience that this is about the limit of my smartphone camera.
So how many photons are involved in a situation like this?
First of all, let's work out how many photons are put out by the lightbulb. We then need
to work out how many hit the person, bounce off and reach the camera, and then land on a given
pixel on the detector.

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Let's start with the power put out by the light-bulb. A typical incandescent (tungsten
filament) light bulb has a power-rating of around 60W, while an equally bright LED light has a
power-rating of around 6-9W. But we know that light-bulbs get hot, so much of the energy is
being wasted as heat, not turned to light. If you search the web on this, you find that LEDs
convert around 10% of the power into light, while incandescent bulbs convert around 2%. So
either way, we are getting around 1W of light energy out.
Another way to work this out is to look up the brightness of a typical bulb, which is
measured in lumens. One lumen at the wavelength the human eye is most sensitive to (0.55
microns, yellow) is roughly 1/700 W, and a typical 6-9 W light-bulb puts out around 450 lumens.
So that gives us around 0.5 W, comparable to the figure above.
So let's run with 1W as the power of a light-bulb.
Inverse Square Law
But how much of this 1W of power reaches the person we are photographing?
If we assume there is no fog, the photons will not be absorbed until they hit something.
But as they fly out from the light-bulb in all directions, they are spread over a bigger and bigger
area, so the number of photons hitting a particular unit area goes down.
Imagine you have a light-source that emits a total power L uniformly in all directions.
This total power is called the luminosity in astronomy, and might represent the radiation coming
from a star, or the light power emitted by a light-bulb. Now imagine a sphere of radius r centred
on the light-source. All this power L must pass through this sphere (if there is no fog to absorb it
inside the sphere). As the light is assumed to spread out equally in all directions, that means that
the power is spread uniformly across the sphere, so the power per unit area at the sphere (known
as the flux f) is just the luminosity divided by the surface area of the sphere: i.e.
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This is an example of an inverse-square law - something that decreases as one over the
distance squared. Other examples include gravity and electric field.
So the flux of light hitting someone 10m from the light-bulb will be
Some of this will be absorbed when it hits the person, and some will be reflected off. It it
hits a white tee-shirt, most would be reflected, while if it hits dark hair, rather little will be
reflected. For the moment, to keep things simple, let's assume it's all reflected (say shining off
someone's gleaming white teeth...).
How much hits each pixel?
So the light bounces off the person - let's assume it bounces off evenly in all directions
(probably not true, but close enough for this sort of Ninja calculation). Some fraction will hit the
camera lens, and land on a particular pixel.

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There are two effects going on here. Firstly, only the light from a small square region of
the person will fall in a given pixel on the camera. The further the person is from the camera, the
larger will be the area of the person per pixel. And because the area is larger, more light from the
light-bulb will be hitting it and bouncing off.
The light from this square region will then spread out in all directions, and as it spreads
over a larger and larger sphere, there will be less light per unit area.
So let's say the amount of light reflecting off the person per unit area is I.
The square on the person that will be focused on a given pixel has length l, where by the
small angle approximation, . Now if you remember,
where p is the pixel size and L is the focal length of the camera. So factoring this in, the
total amount of light power reflected from this square is
This light will spread out over a sphere, as per the usual inverse-square-law. Well,
actually it will bounce off more in some directions than others, but this should be good to within
a factor of two or so. So the power per unit area (flux) reaching the camera lens will be
How much of this will go through the camera lens? The power going into the camera will
be the power per unit area times the area of the camera lens. If the lens has a diameter D, then it's
area is
So the power entering the camera lens that will fall on his particular pixel is given by
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A few of things to note about this. Firstly, the amount of power does not depend on how
far the camera is from the target! Which sounds strange - surely you'd get more light if you were
closer in? The reason is that we are dealing with the light on each pixel, and the further away you
go, the more of your target fits into each pixel.
Secondly, it depends on D/L. The diameter of the lens divided by your focal length. This
parameter has a name - or to be precise, its reciprocal has a name, the f-number. The f-number is
L/D, so we see that the amount of light energy hitting each pixel depends on 1/f2. So you really
want a small f-number to get lots of light on each pixel. Indeed lenses with small f-numbers are
called "fast" lenses. Current smartphone camera adverts boast of the small f-numbers of their
lenses, as this increases their low-light sensitivity.
Thirdly, other things being equal, small pixels means less light per pixel. This might be a
problem - but how serious is it?
Count the Photons
We now have all the clues we need to work out how many photons are landing on each
pixel. We know that I ~ 10-3 W m-2. For my Samsung Galaxy S6, the pixel size p = 1.12x10-6 m,
and the camera has a f-number of 1.9. So the energy landing on each pixel per second, when I
point at the person lit by a 10m distant light-bulb, is
Not very much power.
Now we calculated earlier that each visible light photon has an energy of around 3.6x10-
19
J. Which means we are getting around 60 photons per second per pixel.
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But if our exposure time is 1 second, camera shake will blur our photo (unless we are
using a tripod). To get a sharp image, we need an exposure time of something like 1/60 of a
second (though we may be able to get away with longer if we use image stabilisation). So we are
looking at around 1 photon per pixel! And that's assuming every photon is detected.
This is a very rough calculation, but you can see that we are photon-starved in this
situation. You could count the number of photons per pixel in each exposure on the fingers of
one hand.
How does this affect the image quality?
Root n statistics
The small number of photons hitting each pixel gives us two problems.
To get a nice image of the person, we'd like to know the relative brightness of their face,
their hair, see the shadows under their chin etc. So the expected amount of light from different
parts of their body (falling on different pixels in the camera) should be different - otherwise they
would look like a cartoon.
So let's say we should be getting 20% more light in one pixel than another. In bright
daylight, you might get 10000 photons in one pixel and 12000 in the other, which is fine. But in
low light conditions, you might expect to get 1 photon and 1.2 photons. And therein lies the first
problem. You can't get fractional photons. They are quanta of energy, and the whole idea of a
quantum is that you can't divide it up. You either get one or you don't.
So most likely you will get one photon in both pixels, and the difference in brightness is
lost. Or you might (roughly 1/5 of the time) get two photons in the second pixel, in which case
the difference in brightness will be grossly exaggerated. Either way, your image won't look good.
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But it's even worse than this. The arrival of photons is a random process. If you expect
(say) 3 photons per exposure in a given pixel, sometimes you will indeed get 3. But sometimes
you will only get 2 while other times you may get 4.
Think of it light counting raindrops landing in a particular paving stone in a rain shower.
On average each paving stone may get 1 drop per second. But the arrival of each raindrop is
random - some stones may get 3 or 4 drops in one second, and none the next.
We cover this situation in the labs, when we talk about counting experiments.
Mathematically the number of photons you expect is given by the Poisson distribution. And
roughly speaking, if you expect n photons, you will actually get photons - i.e. an
uncertainty of root n.
So let's say you were getting 100 photons per pixel on average. The uncertainty would be
the square root of 100, i.e. 10. Which means that if you took a picture of a perfectly blank sheet
of paper, it would not look blank - pixels would randomly look ~10% brighter of fainter than the
average. Which would look pretty speckled. To bring the fluctuations down to 1%, you'd need
10000 photons per pixel.
And this is photon noise - a fundamental limit to low-light photography.
Thermal noise
In reality, things are even worse than this. A photon hitting a detector creates an electron-
hole pair. The electron is attracted to an electrode, and the charge counted.
But all the atoms in your detector are jiggling around due to their thermal energy. And
sometimes this jiggling will hit an electron hard enough to create an electron-hole pair, even in
the total absence of light. This is called "dark current". On average you can subtract it off,
because it should be the same for each pixel, but once again the root-n statistics will come in to
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play and introduce an uncertainty n how much dark current is in each pixel. The only cure for
this is to cool down your detector. This is what astronomers do, but it's not practical for
smartphone cameras.
Then your electrode has to measure the charge. But the charge on one electron is pretty
small - it must be amplified before it can be counted. But the electrons in the circuit doing the
amplification are jiggling around due to their thermal energy, and this to introduces noise.
In practice, with a short exposure time and carefully designed electronics, these effects
aren't too bad. But the photon noise is a fundamental problem and no amount of clever
engineering can do away with it.
So how can you get better photographs in low light conditions? One answer is a smaller
f-number, as we discussed before. But it's hard to get good optics in a very low f-number lens
across the whole field of view.
Another possibility is to make the pixel size bigger. But that then reduces the fine detail
in your image, unless you make your focal length longer (and hence your camera bigger). This is
why my digital SLR camera takes better low-light pictures than my smart-phone: it has a f-1.4
lens, and 4 micron pixels. The f-1.4 lens gives a (1.9/1.4)2 advantage, and the 4 micron pixels
gives a (4/1.12)2 advantage.
Another approach is to cheat. Most things you photograph are going to have flat expanses
of uniform brightness. Such a region will be spread over many pixels. If you average the signal
detected by all these pixels, the averaging will reduce the noise, as we discuss in the labs. Most
modern cameras and smartphones use some sort of smoothing to reduce noise in low-light
conditions, though this comes at the expense of reducing detail.
#
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Conclusions
So - can we make smartphone cameras better? Not easily? We could make their pixels
smaller and have more mega-pixels, but that wouldn't give us much more detail due to the
diffraction limit. And in low light conditions, there are too few pixels to give good images
through small pixels.
One solution is to build a really big camera with a small f-number and large pixels. And
that it what astronomers do. Astronomical telescopes can have angular resolutions of better than
0.1 arcseconds (600 times better than my smartphone), and detect distant galaxies 1011 times too
faint to see with the human eye. But these telescopes are limited by the same factors that limit a
smartphone camera - the diffraction limit and a shortage of photons.
Another solution is being clever with the software - this can't bring back details lost in
noise, but it can do a lot -
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067252/the-future-of-photography-is-about-computation
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Week 4: Quantum Mechanics and the Properties of Matter
Quantum Mechanics and the Properties of Matter
Is it possible to develop materials that are twice as strong as our current best? Ten times
as strong? A million times as strong? Could we develop fuels or batteries that store ten times as
much energy as our current best? A hundred times more? Or are we stuck with only incremental
improvements?
To answer these questions, we will "go to first principles" - i.e. try to see what are the
fundamental physical principles behind the properties of matter. And that means delving into
quantum mechanics, as without it the fundamental properties of matter are incomprehensible.
Spectrographs
The first evidence for quantum mechanics came from spectroscopy. If you heat up some
gas, it will glow. If you take the glowing light and put it through a prism or a diffraction grating,
you can split it up into its component wavelengths.

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Schematic diagram explaining how a simple spectrograph works.
The WiFeS spectrograph on the ANU's 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory.
We normally plot the output from a spectrograph as a spectrum - a plot of the intensity of
light at different wavelengths. Here, for example, is a spectrum I took of a quasar (a giant black
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hole in the middle of a galaxy, eating the surrounding gas - this particular one is about 12 billion
light years away):
What you can see is that at some wavelengths this quasar emits light very strongly (most
strongly of all at around a wavelength of 514 nm) while at other wavelengths it emits very little
light (e.g. 380 nm).
How does a spectrum correspond to what you'd see with the human eye? Basically the
human eye contains three different types of receptor cells (called cone cells). Each type of cone
cell is sensitive to light with a variety of different wavelengths:

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So the "S" cones (S for short wavelength) are most sensitive to light at around 440nm,
but have some sensitivity to light over the range 400-520nm.
When you look at most objects, you will be picking up light at a variety of wavelengths.
This light will stimulate all three types of cones to some extent, and the combined signals are
processed in the brain to give you the perception of colour. The background colours in the above
plot show you what a beam of mono-chromatic light (i.e. light with only one wavelength) would
look like. But most objects will give light with a variety of wavelengths.
What would you expect the spectrum of hot gas to look like? Light (and all
electromagnetic radiation) is emitted whenever you accelerate charge, as we will see later in this
course. If you heat up a gas, the atoms will be bumping into each other regularly, which might
disturb the electrons and make them accelerate. But this would be a very chaotic process, causing
many different amounts of acceleration, and hence light with all sorts of different wavelengths.
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Instead, what you get is quite different:
This is a spectrum of some heated copper and argon vapour (a combination often used to
calibrate telescope spectrographs). What you see is that this gas emits very strong radiation at
some very specific wavelengths, and none at all at other wavelengths.
Everything in the above graph is perceived as blue by the human eye - so this level of
detail is invisible to us without the aid of a spectrograph.
This is incredibly useful in practice - by looking at what exact wavelengths some gas
emits, you can deduce the composition of the gas, and sometimes its motion, temperature and
pressure.
But what's the reason for these ridiculously specific wavelengths? Why would the gas
above emit so strongly at (say) 454.6 nm wavelength, but not at 454.7 nm?
One clue - exactly the same thing occurs with the sound spectra from musical
instruments. If you pluck a guitar string and record the sound, you can plot air pressure versus
time - it looks like this:

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You can break this pattern up into its component frequencies. Basically any pattern can
be reproduced out of a combination of pure sine-waves. Take this pattern, for example:
Looks pretty complicated. But it is just the sum of the following pure sine-waves:
This can be done mathematically using a technique known as a Fourier Transform. You
will learn this in 2nd year, though many software packages will do this for you ("frequency
analysis").
If we decompose the sound of a plucked guitar string into its component frequencies, we
get the following sound spectrum:

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(obtained using the sox program: http://sox.sourceforge.net/)
What you can see is that just like the light spectrum of the gas, there are sharp peaks with
not much in-between - the peaks are around 50db above the troughs, which is a factor of 105
difference in energy.
Why does the sound emitted by a plucked guitar string have peaks at certain frequencies,
and very little power at others? This happens because sound is a wave, and because the guitar
string is fixed at both ends. This means it can only vibrate with wavelengths that allow both ends
to remain fixed:
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The lowest frequency (about 90Hz for the guitar string - note ~F2, the F two octaves
below middle C) is the pattern shown on the left, with maximum vibration in the centre and none
at the ends. In this case, the wave on the string has a fixed point (node) at each end and a point of
maximum oscillation (antinode) in the centre. So the wavelength of this string waves is twice the
length of the guitar string.
Then you get the next pattern, with a node in the middle as well as the ends, and a
wavelength half that of the previous one (which means a frequency twice as great - we'll examine
the relationship between wavelengths and frequencies later in the course). This corresponds to
the spectral peak at around 180 Hz (F one octave below middle C). And so on - all the
wavelengths must allow both ends of the string to not move, which means they must have integer
ratios of frequency to the lowest peak (known as the fundamental). These integer frequency
ratios were discovered by Pythagorus originally and are the basis of chords and harmony in
western music. These string waves trapped on each end are called standing waves. We'll cover
this much more in the waves and optics part of the course.
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Most musical instruments have some equivalent of this. For wind instruments, you have
sound waves inside the tube, which must have zero amplitude at closed ends, and maximum
amplitude at any open ends. This once again gives a series of different frequencies with integer
ratios of frequency. Drums and bells also radiate sound at particular frequencies, but due to their
complex shapes these different frequencies may not be at integer ratios, and so don't sound
harmonic.
So, we see that we can get narrow spectral lines if we confine waves in some way, like on
a string or in a tube.
But how can that apply to spectral lines of light from atoms? Atoms consist of a nucleus
with electrons moving around them, but these are particles, not waves. You can't have standing
waves, nodes and hence spectral lines for particles, can you?
This is the central weirdness of quantum mechanics - you need particles to behave like
waves some times. But surely waves and particles are quite different things?
Two Slit Experiment
There is a famous experiment that brings this paradox into sharp focus: the two slit
experiment.
Imagine that you have a source of electrons in a vacuum chamber. It emits electrons in
random directions every so often, which then fly off until they hit the walls. The walls are
covered with phosphor, so when an electron hits the wall it produces a tiny flash of light which
can be seen and recorded. This is very much like what you have in an old-fashioned cathode ray
tube TV.
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If we recorded all the flashes of light for a while, we'd expect to get a pattern that might
look something like this:
Now - let's put a barrier between the electron source and the phosphor coated wall - a
metal sheet that blocks the electrons. But we'll cut two slits in the the barrier to allow some of the
electrons through:
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What would you expect the pattern or recorded flashes on the phosphor-coated wall to
look like now? You'd expect most electrons to be blocked, so you'd only see flashes from those
that went through the slits, so you'd think we'd see something like this:
But if you do the experiment, what you actually get is a pattern like this:
The most common place to get flashes is actually half way between the two slits! You get
a series of bands of flashes, with bands with no flashes in-between.
Here is some data from an actual experiment that does this:

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(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#/media/File:Double-
slit_experiment_results_Tanamura_2.jpg )
This is weird! How can an electron end up at the point on the phosphor wall directly
behind the central blocking? Why do you get bands of electrons arriving?
This pattern seems completely inexplicable if electrons are particles, but would make
perfect sense if they were waves. A wave would diffract through each slits, spreading out. And in
some directions the waves would add up in phase and reinforce, giving a strong signal, while in
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others the peaks coming from one trough would line up with the troughs coming from the other,
you'd get destructive interference and no signal.
But how can an electron be a wave? It produces a single flash when it hits the phosphor
screen. That means it has a definite time and place - which sounds like a particle, not a wave.
And there's worse. You can reduce the intensity of the electron source so low that there
will typically be only one electron flying around at a time. And you still get these bands! But you
only get interference patterns like this by combining the waves going through both slits. How can
a single electron go through both slits?
So - what can we do? We need electrons to behave both like a particle (have a definite
time and place when they hit the screen) but also behave like a wave (go through both slits at
once, interfere with itself, diffract through the slit).
Probability Waves
The solution to this apparent paradox is a very strange one - the idea of probability
waves.
The basic idea is - electrons are waves, but these are waves of probability. The amplitude
of the wave tells you the probability that the electron is at a particular place, when you make a
measurement.
As long as you don't make a measurement that might pinpoint the location of the
electron, it remains as a wave, and can interfere with itself, diffract, etc. But as soon as you make
a measurement that ties its position down (like using a phosphor screen), the waveform
"collapses", and you will measure a definite position. Where this position might be is random,
but the probability is given by the amplitude of the wave function.

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Which is seriously weird. When you don't look, electrons behave like waves. They
diffract around corners, go through two slits at once, and generally are spread-out with no
definite position. But as soon as you look, everything changes. Suddenly they have a definite
position. But what position? That's random. But not totally random - the odds of finding it
somewhere depends on the whole spread-out wave business.
There are many serious objections to this whole picture. It introduces randomness and
probability into the fundamentals of the universe. Before quantum mechanics came along, the
laws of physics were laws - they told you what would happen. "The particle will be here - no ifs,
no buts." But now the laws are more like guidelines: "There is a 37% chance of the particle being
over there, and a 16% chance of it being here...". And this uncertainty is not just because our
measurements are poor, or because there is something going on we haven't accounted for. Even
with perfect measurements and perfect theory, the world is still fundamentally uncertain. This
really annoyed Einstein, who famously said "God does not play dice". But it seems that God did
not agree...
And there's worse! The probability wave collapses to give you a particle with a definite
position when you make a measurement. But what counts as a measurement? And why should it
collapse the waveform?
This paradox was most famously highlighted with Schrodinger's cat. Imagine that you
have a cat in a box, together with a radioactive source. This radioactive source has a 50% chance
of decaying, and if it decays, there is some mechanism that will release poison and kill the cat.
Common sense would tell us that the cat will be either alive or dead, even though we
might not know which until we open the box. But common sense tells us that the electron must
go through one or the other slit, but it doesn't. And according to quantum mechanics, what you
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really get inside the box is a probability wave consisting of a partially alive and a partially dead
cat, which can interfere with each other. It's only when you open the box that you are making an
observation and the waveform collapses into either an alive or a dead cat.
Many people find this deeply unsatisfying. Quantum mechanics works extraordinarily
well experimentally, but has these paradoxes at its heart. They have been debated for decades,
and many ideas have been floated for how to understand them. But for now, let's just accept that
particles can behave like waves, and see where it gets us.
Explaining Spectral Lines
So - if electrons are waves as well as particles, can that explain spectra lines? Yes - it
does, because in an atom, these waves are confined by their electrostatic attraction to the nucleus.
Which makes them very much like guitar string waves or sound waves in a flute - they are
confined, which means that only certain frequencies are allowed. For atoms things are a bit more
complicated because the waves are confined in fuzzy-sided 3D boxes, and because for most
atoms there are multiple electrons confined there. But the basic principle is the same - waves
confined can only have certain discrete frequencies. The details keep physical chemists in work!
It is possible to solve the quantum mechanics wave equation (Schrodinger's equation) and derive
the electron wave patterns using just the laws of quantum mechanics, though in practice this can
only be done for fairly simple atoms and molecules.
But there is a crucial difference to sound waves from a musical instrument. If a guitar
string is plucked so that it vibrates with a particular pattern, it will shake the guitar with that
same frequency, which in turn will shake the air and radiate away energy at this pitch. Which
means the vibration will steadily weaken until it's stopped vibrating, unless you pluck the string
again.
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But for electron waves confined in an atom, they do not normally radiate any energy
away (that would be equivalent to an electron vanishing into thin air, which would violate any
number of conservation laws). Instead, they can change from one wavelength state (say having
two wavelengths across the atom) to another (say having only half a wavelength across the
atom). Each wavelength state has a different energy - the shorter the wavelength, the greater the
energy. So when an electron goes from a short wavelength state to a longer one, it must emit the
difference in energy - and that's where the photons in spectral emission lines come from.
If left to themselves, most electrons will settle down into the lowest energy stare, known
as the Ground State, which has half a wavelength across the diameter of the atom, with a node
at each side and an anti-node in the middle. This is very similar to the fundamental note of a
guitar string.
If the gas is heated up, atoms will collide with each other, and this may knock some of
the electrons up to excited states, perhaps with one wavelength across the atom - notes at either
side and in the middle, with anti-nodes half way out on both sides. Given time the electron will
decay back to the ground state, releasing a photon with the difference in energy. The spectral
lines coming from a given gas thus tell us the differences between its various electron energy
levels. The strength of the different lines can also tell us how many electrons have been excited
to the different energy levels, which will depend on the number and violence of collisions
between the gas atoms, and hence on the temperature and pressure of the gas.
de Broglie Hypothesis
In 1924, Louis de Broglie hypothesised that all objects made of matter (including
electrons) have a wave nature, with wavelength given by the equation , where p is
the momentum of the object in question, and h is Planck's constant 6.626x10-34 Js. This was
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experimentally confirmed within three years, and incorporated as one of the fundamental
principles of quantum mechanics.
What sorts of wavelengths are we talking about? Consider a person walking down the
street. They would have a mass of around 70kg and a speed of around 1 metre per second, so
their momentum p=mv ~ 70 kg m/s. So the wavelength is Planck's constant divided by 70, which
is around 10-35 m. Far too small to be measurable or of any practical consequence - this is why
people don't diffract around corners (or to be precise, why the diffraction is so small that it can't
be measured).
But if you consider much smaller bits of matter, like electrons, the momentum is much
smaller. Consider an electron travelling at 1m/s - it's momentum will be around
, so its wavelength will be around 6x10-4m - only a bit less than a
millimetre! In practice most electrons travel much faster than this, but if you can cool one down
enough to sub metre-per-second speeds, its wavelength can get long enough to have some very
interesting effects. This is one of the major research areas here in Physics at the ANU.
Size of an atom
We now know enough to estimate the most fundamental property of materials - the size
of an atom! Let's work with hydrogen for simplicity sake. It consists of an electron and a proton.
The electron is attracted to the proton by an electrostatic force: Coulomb's law. If it
weren't for quantum mechanics, the electron would just fall in to the proton and we wouldn't
have any atoms. But something stops the electron from falling in - instead it forms a fuzzy cloud
around the proton.
What stops the electron from falling in? Once it was thought that the electrons could orbit
around the proton, with centripetal force balancing gravity (much like the planets orbit around
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the Sun). But electromagnetic theory showed that whenever you accelerate a charge, it radiates
electromagnetic radiation. Motion in a circle is acceleration, and the time needed for an electron
to radiate away its orbital energy would be very short, so that can't work.
But quantum mechanics gives us the answer - the electron is actually a probability wave.
The shorter the wavelength, the large its momentum, and hence its energy. That means that if
you try to squash an electron into a smaller and smaller space, its energy gets larger and larger.
Let's try to put a number on this. Let's assume that an electron in an atom is spread over a
region of size ~a. We won't worry too much about whether this is a radius or diameter - it's just
an order-of-magnitude length scale. If you ever tried to measure the electron's position (say by
bouncing some x-rays off it) you would collapse the waveform and find a definite momentary
position, but as soon as you stopped looking it would go back to fuzzyness, and next time you
measured where it was, it would some somewhere quite different.
This means that the wavelength of the electron wave cannot be much bigger than ~a, so
it's momentum will be roughly p~h/a. Does this mean the electron is going somewhere? On
average no - but if you chose to measure the momentum of the electron at some moment, it
might be going one way or another, but this is an estimate of how much momentum it would
have at that time. If you measured its momentum later, you'd get a different answer.
What is its energy? Well, kinetic energy is . What is the velocity? Well, we know
that the momentum p=h/a, and momentum is classically defined as mass times velocity p=mv.
So v=p/m, and kinetic energy is
So the smaller we make the electron cloud, the more the energy.
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But we also need to factor in the electrostatic attraction between proton and neutron. The
electrostatic potential energy between two charges q1 and q2 separated by distance r is:
which you can get by integrating Coulomb's law. It's negative because an electron
dropped towards a proton gains kinetic energy as it accelerates in, which must be coming at the
expense of losing potential energy. In this case, both charges are the same (e=1.6x10-19 C), and
we'll assume that the distance between the electron and the proton is roughly a. The electron is,
of course, a fuzzy spread-out wave, so defining its position is tricky, but most of the fuzz will be
roughly this far out.
The total energy is thus:
What does this look like? The first term is positive, and goes as one over a squared, so it
will dominate for small values of a. The second term only goes as one over a, and is negative,
and will dominate at larger distances, so combined, the curve will look something like this:
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Natural systems like to settle down to the lowest energy state - so we expect atoms to
have a typical size at the minimum of this curve. Where is this minimum? Differentiate the
energy equation and set this to zero to find the flat part of the curve - the minimum:
so
So according to this calculation, atoms should have a size a of around 10-10 m. Which is
about right - this is the typical size of atoms.
So - we now have fundamental way of understanding why atoms are about 10-10 m big.
The electrostatic attraction of the proton and electrons tries to shrink the atom, but because the
electrons are waves, if you want to squeeze them into a smaller space their wavelength gets
small, so their momentum and energy become very large.
Density
So now we know how big atoms are, we can use this to estimate the typical density of
matter.
Let's take Copper. It has a density of 8960 kg m-3. From a periodic table you can see that
copper has an atomic number of 29 and an atomic weight of around 64. This means it has 29
protons and (64-29) = 35 neutrons. Protons and neutrons both weigh roughly one atomic mass
unit u=1.66x10-27 kg (neutrons actually weigh slightly more - but that difference is negligible at
the level of approximation we're working at). So a copper atom has a mass of roughly
65x1.66x10-27 ~ 10-25 kg.

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And how many atoms are there in a cubic metre? We know that the size is around 10-10
m, but we didn't specify whether this was a radius or a diameter (our calculation was much too
approximate to worry about details like that). Let's treat this size as a radius, and assume that
copper atoms sit in a rectangular grid (they actually have a face-centred cubic structure, but that's
not so different for current purposes). So each atom is alone in a block of size 2x10-10m on a
side. Thus the total number of atoms in a one cubic metre block of copper will be around:
So the density of copper should be roughly
which is actually pretty close to the measured value - well within a factor of two.
So we see that there are fundamental limits to the densities of normal matter. Atoms can't
get much smaller due to the wave nature of electrons. Not all atoms are exactly the same size, but
you're not going to get atoms ten or a hundred times smaller than this. So if you want a really
dense material, your best bet is to make it out of a substance with a high atomic mass, like
osmium or uranium. You can't make something the thickness of tissue paper that weighs tonnes.
But how about the material in neutron stars and white dwarfs? A teaspoon full of neutron
star material would weigh a billion tonnes (the density of neutron-star material is around 1017 kg
m-3). Doesn't that go against what we just calculated?
Well - we were assuming that atoms are surrounded by clouds of electrons, and that the
typical separation of atoms is given by the radius of this electron cloud. But in a neutron star the
gravity is so intense that the electrons have been forced into the nuclei, where they've combined
with the protons to form neutrons. White dwarf stars still have electrons, but the energy equation
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we used to work out the size of each atom needs a new term - a gravitational term, which turns
out to be much stronger than the electrostatic term and causes electrons to be squeezed into much
smaller spaces.
There are a number of practical applications that could benefit from higher density
materials. The best known in armour-piercing shells to destroy tanks - or alternatively tank
armour to resist these shells. Depleted uranium is widely used in both tank shells and tank
armour.
Energy Storage
We've calculated the size of an atom - but how about the energy it can store? We've seen
that a hydrogen atom has a size of around 10-10 m. The electrostatic potential energy you get by
moving an electron from infinity down to a=10-10 m from a proton is:
This is a very small number as expressed in Joules - physicists typically quote atomic
energies in electron volts. An electron volt is the energy an electron acquires when accelerated
over a potential difference of one volt. They are written as eV, and have a numerical value of
1.602x10-19 J. The energy we calculated here is -14 eV.
This is actually very close to the correct value of the binding energy of an electron in a
hydrogen atom, which is 13.6 eV (also known as the Rydberg energy). This is the energy you
need to hit a neutral hydrogen atom with to ionise it - to knock its electron clean out. And it's the
energy you get if you combine an electron with a proton.
How would you expect this energy to differ for other atoms? I'd expect it to be similar to
the energy needed to add or remove the last electron from a heavier atom, for example, to
remove the 12th electron from a carbon atom. The exact figure would differ, depending on the
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precise size of each atom, but it should be roughly the same. If you had a bare heavy nucleus
(e.g. an iron nucleus with no electrons) and added a first electron to it, I imagine you'd get quite a
bit more energy, because of the larger charge of the nucleus. But that's not a common situation -
most ions are only missing one or two electrons.
How about chemical bond energies? Roughly speaking, an ionic bond involves one atom
losing an electron and another one gaining it, so the energy should be broadly comparable to the
figure we calculate. The exact details are very complicated, and are the subject of most of
chemistry, but I'd imagine strong bonds would have a bit less energy than what we calculated,
and weak bonds would have much less energy.
Is this correct? Let's check. Chemists have measured and tabulated typical bond energies.
For the bond between hydrogen and carbon, this energy is 411 kJ/mol. A mole is, by definition,
Avogadro's number worth of atoms or molecules - i.e. 6.02x1023 atoms.
So the energy per bond is:
which is pretty close to our calculation.
In practice, chemical reactions do not just involve breaking a bond - they involve
replacing it with another, typically lower energy bond, so the energy you get out should be the
difference between the starting and finishing bond energies. Which will be less than the bond
energies themselves.
How much less? Let's look at a practical example, the combustion of petrol. This
involves the reaction 2C8H18+25O2->16CO2+18H2O, which experimentally liberates around
4x107 J/kg.
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A molecule of C8H18 has 8 carbon atoms (each of mass 12 atomic mass units) and 18
hydrogen atoms (mass 1 atomic mass unit). So the total molecular mass is ~ (8x12+18)x1.66x10-
27
~ 2x10-25 kg. So there are roughly 5x1024 molecules in a kilogram of petrol, each of which has
8+18=26 bonds.
Thus the energy change per bond during the chemical reaction (when the C-H bonds are
replaced with C-O and H-O bonds)is:
which is a little less than the ~ 10-18 J/bond we estimated earlier, but not too far off.
So what is this telling us? That there is a fundamental reason for the amount of energy
you can get from fuel. You can't get much more than 10-18 J from a given atom. This gives you
around 40-50 MJ/kg from petrol or similar hydrocarbons - it can go as high as around 55 MJ/kg
for methane and down to around 10-20 MJ/kg for burning wood or digesting food.
The best possible chemical energy storage would involve the maximum number of bonds
but the lightest atoms - which you get by burning hydrogen with oxygen. But even this only gets
you up to around 140 MJ/kg. Some rocket engines use this, due to its excellent energy to mass
ratio, though the practical problems of keeping liquified hydrogen in safe storage aboard the
rocket mean that hydrocarbon fuels are often more practical. Hydrogen fuel cells are also used to
supply electricity and are one possible future power source for cars.
By comparison, the lithium-ion batteries used in most portable electrical devices are
pretty pathetic - even the best lithium-ion cells only have energy densities of around 0.9 MJ/kg.
Why so low? The actual energy you get out of a battery per kilogram of lithium used is 41.7
MJ/kg - i.e. very comparable to petrol. The problem is that most of the mass in your battery is
not the lithium ions. A lithium ion battery has the active ingredient (Lithium) dissolved in an
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organic solvent, sandwiched between electrodes (typically of carbon and metal oxide). Then the
whole thing needs to be enclosed to stop it reacting with air or exploding/leaking. So in the end,
most of the mass is in the solvent, electrodes and case - only ~2% is actually the lithium ions.
The same is really true for internal combustion engines. While the petrol itself has a very
high energy density, it needs an engine to turn it into useful work, and typical car engines have
masses of around 150kg. If you fill up a car with 50 litres of petrol (one litre of petrol has a mass
of around 1kg), this means you need 3kg of engine for every kg of fuel, reducing the total energy
density by a factor of 4. And because a petrol engine is a heat engine, it has a maximum
efficiency of no more than around 50%. So realistically a hydrocarbon engine only generates
around 1/2x50/4~6 MJ/kg. Which is still a lot better than lithium-ion cells. Makes you wonder if
it might be feasible to build really small petrol-driven engines to power laptops...
So - there is a fundamental limit to how much energy you can get from atoms. But most
current power sources are quite a way off this limit, so there is room for improvement.
And we haven't discussed nuclear power - that's a whole different matter, and can provide
MUCH higher energy densities, because it relies on the binding energy of atomic nuclei, not
atoms.
Tensile strength
How strong can matter be? Tensile strength is how much you can pull something before
it snaps - it's measured in newtons per square metre - i.e. the force that a cable of cross-sectional
area one square metre can withstand. Note that these are the same units as pressure (Pascals -
equal to newtons per square metre).
How much force does it take to break a chemical bond? We've seen that the energy
required is around 10-18 J, and that atoms are around 10-10 m in radius. We can work out the force
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using the fact that work done (change in energy) is force times distance. So the force is roughly
the change in energy divided by the distance over which the force is applied. Our length scale
here is around 10-10 m, so the force must be roughly:
Another way to think of this is that force is the gradient of the potential energy diagram.
You can see that the gradient of this curve is zero (it's flat) at the bottom. That means that
very little force is needed to move an atom when it's near its equilibrium position. But then as
you pull them further and further apart, the slope steepens, so the force gets stronger. This is
normal behaviour for a spring. The blue line shows the maximum slope - the slope here is
roughly 10-18 divided by 10-10, as above. Note that the above curve and values are for one
electron in a single atom, not a chemical bond, but we're assuming that strong bonds behave
similarly, and as we saw in the last section, they do!
And then as we pull the atoms further apart still, the curve flattens out and the force goes
away - this happens when a material has broken.

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So - we need a force of around 10-8 N to pull atoms apart. This can actually be measured
directly - you can use atomic force microscopes or optical tweezers to stretch and pull apart
individual atomic bonds!
Now let's consider our cable, with cross-sectional area one square metre. Imagine slicing
through the cable. How many atoms will you see on the cut slice? If each atom has a radius of ~
10-10 m, then each atom occupies a box 2x10-10 m on a side. So over the whole cross section, you
will have:
So if we have this many atoms, and each can exert a force of 10-8 N, the total force that
the cable can supply must be around 10-8x2.5x1019 ~2x1011 Pa.
How does this compare to actual materials? High quality steel has a tensile strength of
around 1000 MPa (109 Pa) which is considerably worse than this limit. This is because steel
usually fails because of imperfections and/or cracks propagating with it. Some synthetic
polymers, like Aramid (Kevlar) are five times stronger, which is still not close to the theoretical
limit (these fibres are used in bullet-proof vests). The strongest materials yet produced are carbon
nanotubes, with tensile strengths of up to 63 GPa (6x1010 Pa) which is actually getting pretty
close to the theoretical value. This is presumably because they have no imperfections and have
strong atomic bonds lined up perfectly. Unfortunately, they have only been manufactured in tiny
lengths so far...
So - in theory we could have materials with tensile strengths of up to around 1011 Pa.
These would be incredible for all sorts of technological applications, from space elevators to
tennis rackets. Carbon nanotubes actually get close to this limit, but all other materials are one to
two orders of magnitude worse, due to imperfections and propagating cracks.

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Conclusions
So, what have we learnt? We are pretty much stuck with using atoms to make things, and
the properties of atoms are set by the laws of electric fields and by quantum mechanics. The size
of atoms is pretty much fixed at around 10-10 m. This in itself places a limit on how small you
can make things. Microelectronics is already pushing close to this - components in
microprocessors are now only ~ 10 nm (10-8 m) in size, meaning they are only around 100 atoms
across.
The energy needed to pull an electron out of an atom is around 10-18 J, and this is also a
rough upper limit on the energy you can get per chemical bond. This is pretty close to what you
actually get from burning hydrocarbons and eating a ham sandwich, but is much higher than
what you get from a rechargeable battery. So there can't be any super-fuels with drastically more
energy, but there is a lot of potential to improve batteries.
To force needed to pull an electron out of an atom (which should be roughly the force
needed to break a chemical bond) is around 10-8 N, which corresponds to a tensile strength of
around 1011 Pa (100 GPa). Most practical materials are 10-100 times worse than this, because of
defects, but if you can make perfect chemical bonds (as with carbon nano-tubes) you can get
close to this theoretical limit.
You should also pay attention to many of the methods used in these calculations. In
addition to introducing the key concepts of quantum mechanics, we looked for an energy
minimum to find the size of at atom - a very common and powerful technique you will see many
times again in physics. And we used the slope of the energy diagram to work out the force - also
another very common and powerful technique you will see many times again.
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Week 5: The Nano-World and Statistical Thermodynamics
Plenty of Room at the Bottom
We've seen that there are good physical reason why we don't have immensely better cars
and flying cars - it's not just that scientists haven't been smart enough.
But could this be true more widely? Could science be coming up against hard limits,
where future major breakthroughs are not possible?
This may possibly be the case for big things - like faster planes. But we know it's not true
for small things, because nature has evolved technological marvels (like a mosquito) that are far
more sophisticated than anything humans can produce. Just think of it - a machine with a mass of
10-6 kg that can fly for hours without refuelling, contains a sophisticated sensor package capable
of tracking down food and mates, can make copies of itself (reproduce) without the aid of a
factory, repair damage to itself. Pretty amazing.
Richard Feynman gave a talk in 1959
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom ) in which he said
"There's plenty of room at the bottom". There may or may not be room for progress with big
things (spaceships, aircraft etc) but there is certainly plenty of room for technological advances
in small things. And he's been proven right since then - there has only been limited progress with
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large things since then, but there has been fantastic exponential progress in small things like
microprocessors.
This has led to the whole field of nano-technology. Many people are very sceptical about
this term - it often seems to be purely a way of re-badging bits of physics, chemistry and biology
to make them seem trendy to governments. We know that nature was able to evolve incredible
nano-machines, but it did take nature 4 billion years to get there - is it really feasible for us to
manipulate the nano-world, what are the factors that might limit us, and what could we hope to
achieve?
In this section we'll investigate the strange properties of the nano-realm. In particular, I'll
focus on thermodynamics and some macro-scale properties that depend on it, as this turns out to
be crucial to understanding what happens at nano-scales.
We'll start off by thinking about how physics varies on different scales.
Electricity vs Gravity
There are many books and movies in which heroes are shrunk to tiny sizes or enlarged to
enormous size (e.g. Ant-man, Gulliver's Travels, "Honey I Shrunk the Kids", Fantastic Voyage).
In most of these cases, the shrunk or enlarged people walk around just like normal. But that's
actually not very realistic - when you change size by a lot, different laws of physics become
important.
It is possible to sketch out some different size regimes, where different laws of physics
are most important. All the laws of physics apply at all scales - it's just that some are more
important than others in particular size ranges.
One issue is the relative importance of gravity compared to electromagnetic forces (such
as chemical bonds). Normally, the electromagnetic force is MUCH stronger than gravity. To see
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this, consider two people, each with a mass of around 100 kg, standing 1m apart. The
gravitational force between them is given by Newton's law of gravity:
(it's not going to push you over...). Note I've approximated G as 10-10 (its actual value is
6.67x10-11 N m2 kg-2).
But now imagine that both people had 1% too many electrons. What would the
electromagnetic force between them be? Now a proton weighs around 10-27 kg, so there are
roughly 102/10-27 = 1029 electrons in a 100 kg person (neglecting the presence of neutrons -
which is probably fine for this sort of very rough estimate). Charge on an electron is around 10-19
C, so your total charge would be ~108 C each (1% of 1010).
The electrostatic repulsion between the two people would be given by Coulomb's law -
- big enough to rip the Earth in two!
So if electromagnetic forces are so very much stronger than gravity, why is gravity so
important on a day-to-day basis? The reason is that electric charges can be both positive and
negative, and across the universe as a whole, the positive and negative charges are exquisitely
balanced. But masses are always positive, so even though gravity is very weak, if you add up
enough mass, it will eventually beat everything else. But on small scales, where charges are not
perfectly balanced, electric forces will totally overwhelm gravity.
#
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Square-Cube Law
Another reason why physics is different on different scales is the square-cube law.
Imagine some object (like a human), of length r. If you make it bigger, while keeping the
proportions the same, the surface area (and any other area, like the cross-section of the legs)
increases proportional to r2. So physics that depends on the areas, like drag forces, heat exchange
with the surroundings, strength of limbs and diffusion of oxygen in the lungs, increase as the
square of the length.
The volume, however, increases proportional to r3. So things that depend on the volume,
like the mass and hence the gravity and momentum, and the total heat capacity, will increase as
the cube of the length.
So both increase as you get bigger, but the volume increases faster. As an example of
how important this can be, consider the ratio of weight to drag forces. Imagine our object is a
cube of size r and with the density of water (1000 kg m-3), moving at v=1m/s through air. The
drag force is roughly
(neglecting small factors like 1/2 and the drag coefficient). The weight force is F = mg ~
10x1000r3 = 104 r3. So the ratio weight/drag is 104 r.
So for a one metre length object (like a fridge), weight is ten thousand times stronger than
drag. So don't push a fridge off the roof - it will break.
By the time you're looking at a grain of pollen (r ~ 10-5 m), drag is ten times greater than
weight - so it will mostly just float around on the wind and not fall.
Different Size Regimes

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So factoring this in, along with some other physics, we can define some rough size
regimes, along with the physics that dominates at them.
1: Quantum world: r<10-9 m or so. On this scale, the wavelengths of the quantum
mechanical probability waves are important, so you are in the world of quantum weirdness, with
interference, standing waves, diffraction of matter etc.
2: Nano-world: 10-9 - 10-7 m or so. This is the world we will cover in this section - where
random thermal motions typically dominate over everything else.
3: Micro-world: 10-7 - 10-4 m or so. Dominated by friction and drag. Fluid flows are
laminar, gravity mostly irrelevant. Everything in thermal equilibrium.
4: Normal-world: 10-4 - 104 m or so. What you've spent your life in.
5: Astronomy-world: 104 - 1022 m or so. Gravity dominates, friction and drag are
irrelevant. Objects move in orbits for ever.
6: Cosmology-world: > 1023 m or so. On really big scales (tens of mega-parsecs and up,
even gravity becomes irrelevant, due to the inverse square law. Instead, the expansion of space
and dark energy are the most important factors.
Don't take this division too seriously! The boundaries are not hard and fast, and depend
on many things other than just size. But this is a good guideline to which physics you should
thing about first!
In this section, we're going to focus on the special physics of the nano-world, and in
particular thermal energy. And we'll show how it also has big implications on larger scales.
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Internal Thermal Energy
Nano-scales are dominated by thermal motions. So let's spend some time analysing them.
Heat is often described as "atoms jiggling around". The faster they jiggle, the higher the
temperature. But it's a bit more subtle than that. If atoms are moving like this:
then even though the atoms are all moving, we'd describe this as an object moving, not as
heat. If, on the other hand, the atoms are moving like this:
then we would call this internal thermal energy, not bulk motion.
There's actually an interesting intermediate pattern that looks something like this:
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this is disordered motion, but not totally disordered - this is called turbulence, and is very
hard to study. If you blow a jet of air out of your mouth, it starts off as bulk motion, but then
turbulence kicks in and the flow breaks up into smaller and smaller eddies (a process known as a
Kolmogorov cascade), until eventually every atom is doing its own thing, and the energy is now
purely heat.
In reality, there is no fundamental difference between internal thermal energy and other
motion. The distinction is purely a matter of convenience. If all the atoms in an object are
moving the same way, we can lump them together and treat them as one combined object. But if
they are all jiggling in different direction, while in principle we could calculate the motion of
each atom, in practice this is impossible (even a small object can have 1020 atoms). So we treat
their motions as random and statistical: as internal thermal energy.
Internal thermal energy can technically defined as all the energy of the atoms and
molecules that is in small scale motions, vibrations and stresses. Motions that are too small to
analyse one-by-one, and random enough that we can treat them statistically.
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In a monatomic gas (one where each atom is not bound to any other atom), this internal
thermal energy is entirely in the form of kinetic energy of the atoms, as they race around in
random directions. Diatomic gasses (like air) can also have some internal thermal energy in the
form of vibrations in the bonds joining the atoms in each molecule together. This energy will
alternate between potential energy in the bond and kinetic energy in the relative motion of the
two atoms. You will also have internal thermal energy in the form of rotation of these molecules.
In a solid, the energy will mostly be in the form of vibrations in the bonds joining
neighbouring atoms (once again oscillating between potential energy in the bonds and kinetic
energy in the random relative motions).
Equipartition and Boltzmann's Constant
The fundamental idea behind statistical thermodynamics is "Equipartition". This principle
states that on average, the internal thermal energy in a system will be shared equally between all
possible forms.
For example, consider a monatomic gas. The thermal energy here will be in the form of
motion. We can break down the motion into three components - motion along the x, y and z
axes, however we define them. The principle of equipartition says that on average, there will be
the same amount of thermal energy in each of these. If you started off with all the atoms racing
back and forth along (say) the x axis, but no motion along the y and z directions, that wouldn't
last long. Atoms would bounce off each other, and before long the average motions in all three
axes would be comparable.
For a diatomic gas, something similar would happen. If you somehow started off with the
molecules moving but not vibrating or rotating, collisions would soon spread the energy equally
between rotation, vibration and motion along the three axes.

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The principle of equipartition basically says that so much random stuff and so many
collisions are going on in most materials at the microscopic level that you are pretty sure to have
the energy spread evenly between all possible forms. For any individual atom or molecule, most
of the energy may be in only some of the forms at a particular moment.
The energy associated with each form of thermal energy is equal to:
where T is the temperature (in Kelvin) and k is Boltzmann's constant,
This equation links the macroscopic quantity (temperature) to the microscopic properties
(mean thermal energy of atoms and molecules). And it's all we need to deduce an awful lot!
Specific Heat Capacity
The specific heat capacity of a material is the amount of energy needed to heat up one
kilogram of the material by one degree.
Can we work this out from first principles?
Let's start with a simple material, like a block of pure metal. Copper has an
experimentally measured specific heat capacity of 385 J/kg, while Iron has a slightly higher
specific heat capacity (450 J/kg). Can we explain why it takes this much energy to heat up these
metals?
An atom in a solid can vibrate back and forth in the x, y and z directions, but that's all it
can do. Along each axis the energy will alternate back and forth between kinetic and potential
(energy in stretched bonds), but the both the kinetic and the potential energy should be 1/2 kT on
average. Thus the total energy per molecule should be 6x1/2 kT = 3kT.
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How many molecules are there in a kilogram of metal? That's just the weight (1kg)
divided by the weight of each molecule, which is to a good approximation its atomic mass a
times the atomic mass unit u. So the total thermal energy in a block of metal should be:
That's the total thermal energy, and it's pretty big. Consider a 1kg lump of iron at room
temperature (~300 K). The atomic mass of iron is 56. So the energy is
Compare that to the kinetic energy of this lump of iron if you threw it at someone. Let's
say you can throw it pretty hard - at say 5 m/s. The kinetic energy would be
So the energy in the random thermal motions of a block of iron (or of anything else at
room temperature) contain vastly more energy than any plausible motion of this blow.
Now to work out the specific heat capacity of an object, we need to calculate how much
extra energy dE is needed to increase the temperature by an amount dT. We get this by
differentiating the above equation:
Plug in the numbers, and you get a predicted specific heat capacity for copper of 393 J/kg
and for iron, 445 J/kg. Which values are scarily close to the measured ones! This actually seems
to work!
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Now let's try it for water. Water has a very much greater specific heat capacity - around
4184 J/kg - i.e. about ten times that of the metals. Which is very lucky for the Earth - this allows
the oceans to damp out seasonal changes in temperature, giving cooling sea breezes in summer
and keeping Europe warm in winter due to the heat carried by the gulf stream.
But why is its specific heat capacity so incredibly high? If we can figure this out, perhaps
we could have more of whatever makes water so special and have some super substance that can
absorb incredible amounts of heat?
The amount of thermal energy in a material depends on the number of molecules, and not
on how heavy each molecule is. This gives water an advantage, as its molecular mass is much
less than the atomic mass of iron or copper (because hydrogen and oxygen are relatively light
atoms), but not enough to explain the difference.
More of the difference comes from the fact that a water molecule can absorb energy in
many more ways. It can move along three axes, and stress the bonds binding it to other water
molecules along three axes, just like a metal atom. But in addition, it can rotate around three
axes, and the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms can vibrate. All of which gives you
a lot of different degrees of freedom, each of which will have its 1/2 kT. Though even factoring
all this in, you don't predict as value as large as is observed. Most likely the difference is due to
transient hydrogen bonds between broken. These bonds are much weaker than the bonds between
the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but as you heat a liquid up more of them break, mopping up
energy.
So you'd expect the highest specific heat capacities for liquids of big but lightweight
molecules, which can store energy in lots of different ways but not weigh too much, and which
have hydrogen bonds holding them together as liquids. And this turns out to be true - the only
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common substance with a higher specific heat capacity than water is liquid ammonia, which has
all these same factors.
Boiling Point
Water boils at 100 C (by definition). Can we explain this number from first principles?
We see in the quantum mechanics section that a typical bond energy is around 10-18 J, but
that applies to strong bonds, like the covalent bond between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in
water - not to the much weaker hydrogen bonds binding one water molecule to another.
What is the energy needed to break one of these weaker bonds? We can work this out
from the observed latent heat of vaporisation. It takes a whopping 2.26x106 J to boil a litre of
water (the latent heat of vaporisation of water). If we assume one bond per water molecule
(which is probably too small, but only by a factor of 2 or so) then the number of bonds in a
kilogram of water is equal to the number of molecules, which is the mass of water (1 kg) divided
by the mass of one molecule (18 times the atomic mass unit - two from the hydrogen and 16
from the oxygen). Doing this calculation, we find a bond energy of around 10-20 J, which is
indeed somewhat weaker than that for a strong bond.
What breaks this bond when something boils? That must be the thermal energy of the
molecules jiggling around, which is ~3/2 kT. This allows us to estimate the boiling point as:
Which is not bad - the true figure is 373 K high! It is, however, a little high. Why might
that be?
The crucial point is that kT is the average energy of a molecule. Some will have more,
and some will have less. It is possible to calculate the probability distribution of energies - i.e.
the probability that a given molecule will have a particular energy at a particular moment (bear in
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mind that molecules are constantly colliding with each other and exchanging energy). This is
called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and you'll see how it's derived in 2nd year.
But the crucial point is - a small fraction of the molecules will at any particular time have
considerably more than the average amount of energy. So the boiling point of water is not the
temperature at which the average molecule has enough thermal energy to break its bonds and
escape - it's the temperature at which a small fraction of particularly energetic molecules can
escape. They fly away, taking their energy with them, leaving the slower-moving molecules
behind (i.e. cooling the remaining water). But if you keep applying heat to the water, more will
get hot enough to escape until the water all boils.
This is how sweat keeps you cool. Even though it's at well below boiling point, a small
fraction of the fastest moving molecules can break their bonds and escape. Losing the fastest
molecules drops the average speed of the remaining ones, cooling down the sweat and hence
you. Without this mechanism, people would be unable to live anywhere on Earth where the
temperature ever went much above body temperature (~37C), as there would be no way to cool
our bodies down. Which means Australia would have been uninhabitable until the invention of
air conditioning...
I actually wonder what would happen to people if the temperature ever went above 37C
in a place with 100% relative humidity. With this humidity your sweat could not evaporate, so
there would be no way to cool yourself down - your body temperature would presumably rise to
be at least as great as the outside temperature, with nasty consequences - similar to a bad fever,
or even death if the temperature went high enough. Luckily Earth at present seems to have places
with 100% humidity, and places with temperatures well over 37C, but they are not the same
places, at least not at the same time.

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How fast are air molecules moving?
You are sitting (I hope) in a room filled with air. How fast are the molecules in the air
moving?
They can move in three directions (x, y and z axes) and their motion along each axis will,
on average, have an energy of . So the total average motion energy of each molecule will
be around .
This then will be equal to the average kinetic energy - i.e.
So rearranging, the mean velocity is
What's the mass of an air molecule? Air is mostly nitrogen, and nitrogen is diatomic at
atmospheric temperatures and pressures, so a typical molecule has two nitrogen atoms.
Nitrogen has an atomic mass of 14 (i.e. is has a total of 14 nucleons, protons plus
neutrons). The mass of a nucleon is roughly the atomic mass unit:
So the mass of a typical air molecule will be ~ 2x14xu = 4.6x10-26 kg. If we plug this into
the above equation, along with an assumed temperature of around 300 K (27 C), we find that the
typical velocity of an air molecule is around 500 m/s. Which is very fast - that is 1800 km/hr!
That's the speed of a rifle bullet.

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This is why the nano-scale world is dominated by thermal motions - these motions are
fast and contain a lot of energy. If you are a nano-scale machine, you are constantly being
bombarded by these very fast moving molecules.
So at room temperature, molecules move fast. As each molecule at a given temperature
has the same kinetic energy, this means that lighter molecules (like hydrogen) will be going
faster than the heavier ones.
Mean Free Path
We've seen that air molecules are racing around at around 500 m/s. But how far do they
get before they hit another molecule? Let's try and estimate this distance (known as the mean free
path).
How close does a molecule need to get to another one for it to collide? This is not a
straight-forward question to answer - molecules are not like billiard balls - they are fuzzy and
don't have sharp edges.
For a simple model - let's assume all molecules are spherical. Let only one molecule
move - assume all others are stationary, and let's see how far it could go before hitting one.
Assuming the others are stationary shouldn't make much difference - their movement may cause
them to move into or out of the path of the moving molecule, which should roughly balance out.
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We can draw an imaginary cylinder around the path of this moving molecule. Its radius r
is double the radius of the individual molecule - because if it passes within this distance of the
centre of another molecule, there will be a collision. What is the average number of collisions in
time t? If there are n molecules per unit volume, then in time t, the volume of the cylinder swept
out is its cross-sectional area (pi r2) times its length (velocity times time). A collision will happen
on average when there is one atom in this volume - i.e. when
So the average distance between collisions l is
We can work out N from the density of air (~1 kg m-3)divided by the mass of one
molecule (4.6x10-26 for N2), which comes out as around 2x1025 m-3. But what is the effective r of
an air molecule?
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We show in the quantum mechanics section that the radius of an atom is around 10-10 m.
So a diatomic molecule like N2 or O2 is about 4x10-10m long and 2x10-10 m wide. Let's
approximate it as a sphere of radius around 3x10-10m - which means r~6x10-10m (i.e. if the
centres of two molecules get within this distance of each other, there will be a collision). Plug
this in to the above equation and you get a mean free path l ~ 44nm (44x10-9 m).
Which is actually about right! The real mean free path of an air molecule is actually
around 68nm. Which is a very small number, but still around 200 times the size of each
molecule.
How does this compare to the typical spacing of molecules? If we have 2x1025 molecules
per cubic metre, then if w put each in a box of side d, 2x1025 x d3 ~ 1, so d~36nm - i.e. around
100 times the size of each molecule. If you imagine each molecule as being the size of a golf
ball, they would be separated from their neighbours by around two metres - the height of a tall
person. So air is mostly empty space!
How long does a molecule take between collisions? If vt~68nm and v~500 m/s, then the
average time between collisions t~10-10 s - 0.1 nS. A very short time period. So a typical air
molecule endures around ten billion collisions per second!

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Air Pressure
This constant bombardment by molecules is a big problem (or opportunity) for nano-
machines. But even on bigger scales, the cumulative effect of all these impacts is a big one - it's
known as "Air Pressure". It's an enormous force - around 100,000 newtons per square metre (Pa)
at sea level. That's about ten tonnes of force applied to your skin. Luckily it doesn't crush you
because the pressure on all sides of you, and inside you, are all exquisitely balanced. Even a tiny
pressure imbalance would be enough to knock you over.
Actually - there a few situations in which this immense pressure is not balanced and can
be seen. One would be trying to open the outside door of a spaceship, or a submarine, where the
pressure on one side is much greater than on the other. Another occurs when scuba diving. The
pressure doubles when you go 10m underwater - so if your tank fed you air at surface pressure
you would be unable to breath - your lung muscles wouldn't be strong enough to pull the air in.
So in practice you are fed air through a "regulator", which gives you the air at the ambient
pressure. But that can be a problem if you panic while deep underwater, hold your breath and
bolt for the surface. The air inside your lungs will be at much higher than atmospheric pressure,
and if you swim rapidly up into lower pressure regions, the imbalance between the inside and
outside pressure can rip you apart (and you have no nerves on the inside of your lungs to warn
you of the damage you are doing, until too late). So keep breathing as you go up, to equalise the
pressure inside and outside...
Let's calculate how big this pressure force is from first principles. Let's imagine that we
have n molecules per unit volume. Their kinetic energy along any one axis will be 1/2 kT - let's
use the axis pointing towards a wall, and call it the x axis. So this will be equal to their kinetic
energy. So
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so
This is an average - some will be going towards the wall, and some away from it, but on
average this is their typical speed.
How many molecules will hit the wall in a given time t?
Think of a box as drawn above. And consider the components of the velocities in the x
direction (towards and away from the wall). Roughly speaking, half the atoms in this volume
will be moving towards the wall and half away. To begin with, let's assume that the atoms do not
collide with each other. In this case, half the atoms within distance vt of the wall will hit it during
time t. So the number hitting the wall in time t will be:
where N is the number of air molecules per unit volume.

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How realistic is this? In practice air molecules will frequently hit other air molecules
before reaching the wall. But if t is small enough, most molecules won't hit each other during
that time, so it will work. Also, collisions won't really affect the impact rate - they will mean that
molecules far from the wall can't reach it, but those close to the wall will hit it multiple times as
the bounce off more distant molecules - so this should more-or-less cancel out.
Let's assume that molecules bounce off the wall elastically. Realistic? Well, if collisions
are inelastic that would remove energy from the gas and give it to the wall. Which would be
realistic if the gas was hotter than the wall, but wouldn't make sense if they are at the same
temperature. And a small inelasticity will make very little difference - so let's assume things are
elastic.
In this case, a particle moving towards the wall bounces back with an equal and opposite
speed. So the change in velocity is double the initial velocity. The average acceleration over time
t of each molecule is thus 2v/t. Use f=ma, and factor in the number of molecules hitting, and we
find that:
Now F/A (force per unit area) is called pressure. And N is the number of atoms n in a
volume V, so we can re-write this in terms of pressure P and number n (rather than number per
unit volume) to get:

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which is the ideal gas law equation. (it's often quoted as V=mRT, where m is the number
of moles of gas present, rather than the number of molecules. M is thus n divided by Avogadro's
constant, so to compensate, R is equal to k times Avogadro's constant).
Does this equation work? Consider one cubic metre of air - it weighs 1.2kg, which means
it has around 1.2/4.6x10-26 = 2.6x1025 molecules in it (we worked out the mass of a typical air
molecule in the previous section).
So at 300K, the pressure is 2.6x1025x1.23x10-23x300=107,000 Pa, in good agreement
with actual atmospheric pressure!
Cellular Machinery
So the nano-world looks like a pretty hostile place! Imagine that you had been shrunken
down to be only 100 atoms long (10 nm). The molecules in the air around you would appear the
size of golf balls (~ 1% of your height). Every part of your body is hit by golf-balls travelling at
the speed of rifle bullets roughly ten billion times a second. Sound painful? This is clearly going
to jerk you around - as different parts of your body are hit in different directions this will distort
you in all sorts of ways.
It sounds like this constant bombardment would make building nano-machinery very
hard. But in fact, biology has evolved molecular machines that actually use this constant
bombardment to make them work! Without this ceaseless molecular storm, our cells would cease
to work and we'd die instantaneously. There's quite a good book about this if you are interested
called "Life's Ratchet, How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, by Peter M
Hoffmann" - http://lifesratchet.com/ Read it if you'd like the details.
But basically, our cells contain several molecular machines that walk around our cells,
transporting chemicals from place to place, assembling and disassembling structure - all the jobs
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that human builders do on a normal construction site, only incredibly shrunken. You can see an
animation of one of these molecules (kinesin) walking through a cell at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 .
It basically has two legs. But these legs do not contain muscles, or any sort of motor.
Instead, the constant molecular bombardment shifts them around randomly until they are where
they want to be, at which point a chemical reaction locks them in place and releases the other leg,
which will randomly wiggle around until it's in the place where you want it. You can try walking
like this - raise one leg and wiggle it around at random. When it's randomly got to a forward
position, drop it to the floor, then raise your other leg and repeat.
Indeed it is molecular machines like this that are responsible for human muscles. The
fundamental components in your muscles that make them contract are called sarcomeres. They
consist of long fibrous proteins that slide past each other, causing them to contract. And what
makes these fibres slide past each other? Some of these molecular machines, attached to one
fibre and walking along the other one.
You can see an animation of this process at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQocsLRm7_A
Or for more details see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAJ-9nPSqwA
So next time you move any part of your body (hopefully right now, as your heat beats
and your lungs breath), this is caused by molecular chaos helping molecule machines pull protein
fibres along past each other.

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Week 6: Human Performance
Human Performance
What limits the performance of human athletes? This is a very active area of research,
particularly here in Canberra with the Australian Institute of Sport. But we can think of this more
generally too.
Is it possible to have animals that are much stronger or faster than currently exist?
We as humans operate on time-scales of seconds. It takes seconds to think about things
and to do things. Growing and repairing damage is slower - it takes days (~ 104 seconds).
There are life-forms on Earth that are much slower than animals. We call them plants.
They take days or months to respond to changes in their environment.
Imagine that aliens landed on earth, and they operated 104 times faster than we do (i.e. to
them, we would look as slow as trees). Would we even notice they had landed? They could enter
your room, carefully inspect every part, put it all back and leave in a blink of an eye. Perhaps
they did while you were reading this!
Alternatively, this super-fast motion could be possessed by a super-hero ("The Flash")?
My question is - could something like this be possible? Or more practically, could we build robot
warriors with this level of performance

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One clue - we know that the cells in a human body do not operate at anything like their
full potential. Each cell in a mouse burns energy at a rate roughly 10 times greater than a cell in a
human. To supply enough blood to power these mighty cells, a mouse heat beats 300-800 per
minute (compared to around 80 in a resting human). Just imagine if you could get the muscle
cells in a human to burn energy like this - you would definitely be in superhero territory (see the
book "Why Size Matters" by J.T. Bonner http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8241.html).
So let's look at what the capabilities of the human body are, and what physics might be
limiting them.
We often start off a puzzle like this by brainstorming - trying to come up with all possible
ideas. We can then look at them in turn and try to work out which are sensible.
One possible limit - forces. Is there some limit to how much force w can exert? Another
possible limit - energy. How much do we need, where does it come from, how does it get where
it is needed? Let's look at these in turn.
How much force can humans exert?
Clearly the bigger your muscles, the more force you can exert. So perhaps a sensible
measure would be the "stress" your muscles can produce - the force per unit area.
Let's think about my legs. I can lift my body weight on one leg, just about. I weigh 70kg,
so that's a force of mg ~ 70x10 = 700 N.
The muscles in my thigh have a cross-section of roughly 10cm by 10cm. So the stress is
force over area - i.e. 700/(0.12) = 70,000 ~ 105 N/m2.
How about a more elite athlete? Here is Usain Bolt starting off a run.
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From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186096/London-2012-Olympics-Usain-
Bolt-grabs-camera-snaps-historic-frame-winning-200m-final.html
How much force is he exerting? If you measure his speed during a run, you get a plot like
this:
(from http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0143-
0807/34/5/1227;jsessionid=3D9E9592D97BC7614B4A5D107E911567.ip-10-40-1-105)
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This graph is steepest at the start, so that's where his acceleration is greatest. Then it
flattens out after the first ~ 3 seconds, at a speed of around 12 m/s.
We can use F=ma to estimate the force he is applying at the start. After 2.5 seconds he's
moving at around 10m/s, so the average acceleration over this time is around 10/2.5 = 4m/s. This
will be an underestimate of his true maximum acceleration - you can see from the graph that the
curve is actually steeper right at the start. What is this maximum speed? We can estimate it from
the graph:
We draw a tangent line - tangent o the slope at t=0. The slope of this green dashed line
will give his starting acceleration. The line crosses v=10m/s at around 1s, so the initial
acceleration must be around 10m s-2 (i.e. ~ g!). He obviously can't sustain this for more than a
tiny fraction of a second, which is why it actually takes him around 2.5 sec to get up to this
speed.
So - using F=Ma, the force required is around his mass (95 kg) times 10 m s-2, to roughly
1000 N.
But this isn't the total force he is exerting - it's just the horizontal component of his total
force.
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Force is a vector - it has both magnitude (how strong it is) and direction.
In this case we know roughly what direction the total force must be pointing - along his
body. If there was only a vertical force, he would spin in an anti-clockwise way, and if there was
only a horizontal force, he would spin in a clockwise sense. As he isn't spinning very much, the
total force must point along his body.
If there is a vertical force, why isn't he accelerating upwards? I suppose he did a bit right
at the beginning, but by the point when this photo was taken he's already standing up. So the
vertical force isn't there to make him accelerate upwards, it's there to oppose gravity and stop
him sinking into the ground. So the vertical force will be around Mg ~ 950 N. Which is about the
same as the horizontal force. Which is about right - if the two parts of the force were the same,
he would be at a 45 degree angle, which isn't too far wrong. In fact, it looks to me as if he's at an
angle which is a bit less than 45 degrees, which suggests that the vertical force is a bit less
than the horizontal.
But anyway, if we assume they are both around 1000 N, then the total force will be given
by Pythagoras's theorem - i.e.

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which is not that different from the force I exert getting up off the ground on one leg.
"Not that different" in the Ninja sense, of course - the little bit of difference is why he is an
Olympic medallist and I'm not... His leg muscles are much thicker than mine, so the stress (force
per unit cross-sectional area) is probably around the same.
In general, most muscles in most animals have about the same performance - a stress of
around 2x105 N m-2, in pretty good agreement to what we estimated here.
Torque
So we've estimated the stress exerted by muscles. But in general this will not be the force
you actually exert when you push something. Your muscles typically pull on your bones, which
then push your hand/leg/whatever to apply the actual force. And this can considerably change the
actual force exerted.
Consider the exercise known as a "bicep curl". You hold a weight in your arm, and lift it
up by bending at the elbow. How much weight should you be able to lift?
You raise the weight by shrinking the bicep muscle, which is attached up near the
shoulder and down past the elbow. It causes the forearm to rotate and hence lift the weight.
So how much should we be able to lift in this way? To work this out, we need a new bit
of physics, we need to know about rotational forces, which are called Torques.
A torque tells you how much you are trying to make something rotate. It's equal to the
force you apply multiplied by how far you apply it from the hinge.
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In this case the hinge is the elbow. The bicep muscle is applying an upward force a
distance r from the hinge, and the weight is applying a downward force a distance L from the
hinge.
Now let's imagine the weight is just sitting there - you are not raising or lowering it. In
this case, the torques must balance. If they didn't, the weight would be accelerating up or down.
Let us (arbitrarily) decide that clockwise torques are positive. So the torque caused by the
weight is positive and the torque caused by the muscle is negative. The total torque is thus
(so each torque is just the force times its distance from the hinge).
Rearranging, we find that
So how much should a typical person be able to lift in this way? My biceps are roughly
5cm by 5cm, so the force they exert will be 0.052x2x105 ~ 500N. Plugging this into the above
equation, we get a weight M~ 8kg. Which is about right, judging by what I see at the gym.
Force Limit
So we've seen that muscles generally produce a stress of around 2x105 N m-2. As this
applies to all muscles in all animals, perhaps there is a fundamental reason why it isn't greater?
We can compare this to the force between atoms. We worked out earlier that if every
atom pulled every adjacent atom with the full intermolecular force, the total stress would be
around 1011 n m-2. Which is a million times greater than muscles can exert. So the strength of
atomic bonds isn't the reason why muscles aren't stronger.
In fact, it is quite easy to build machines that can exert much more force (per unit cross
sectional area) than muscles. Many excavating machines use hydraulics in place of muscles.
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These are pistons pushed by high pressure oil. And the oil is these systems routinely works at
pressures of up to 500 bar (a bar is 105 Pa, which is roughly one atmosphere). So this is around
250 times more stress than muscles can exert.
So it doesn't seem that muscles are up against any fundamental limit. They are in fact
very puny compared to some quite simple machinery! And muscles are not just slightly worse -
they are drastically worse.
This seems rather odd to me. Why hasn't four billion years of evolution come up with
something better, like hydraulic powered legs?
One possibility is that evolution is stuck in a dead end with the way muscles currently
work. Or perhaps the way muscles work confers some other benefit?
Or it could be that force is not the limiting factor to animal performance. If something
else limits you, then there is no evolutionary benefit in having better muscles.
Energy Consumption
So - it doesn't seem that the force exerted by animal muscles is up against any
fundamental physical limit. So could it be that energy, rather than force, is what limits human
performance?
To investigate this, lets think about how much energy a human uses, and where it goes.
One way to investigate this is to look at how much energy you consume. You could keep
track of how much you eat, for example. The normal dietary recommendation is that someone
eat around 8000 kJ per day if they are not to put on or lose weight (higher for men, lower for
women). This corresponds to around 8x106/(24x60x60) = 93 W.
So roughly speaking, humans consume energy at the rate of ~ 100 W, as measured by
how much you eat (and factoring in the combustion energy of your food). Which is pretty
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economical - remember that a car was using around 2x108 J driving to Sydney, which is about
20,000W. You could power 200 people for the energy cost of one car.
Another way to measure this human energy expenditure is to look at how much oxygen
you breath in, and factor in the combustion energy per unit weight of oxygen.
(figure from MH Laughlin (1999): Cardiovascular response to exercise, American
Journal of Physiology, 277, S244.
This plot is based on people pedalling on a bicycle ergometer. People who don't get much
exercise (sedentary in the graph above) can produce up to around 200W when they try hard,
while elite endurance athletes can manage over 400W.
The slope of the above line tells us the efficiency of human exercise. You work this out
by comparing how much work is being done by your muscles on the bicycle ergometer to the
combustion energy of the oxygen you are consuming.
What you find is that only about 25% of the combustion energy is going into mechanical
work. The rest is presumably ending up as heat.
Work Done
How much mechanical work does a human body need to do when exercising?
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Let's consider an easy case - my morning exercise - a walk up Mt Ainslie. This is about a
300m elevation gain, so the energy needed is the increase in potential energy mgh - which for my
mass (70 kg) is 300x70x10 = 210 kJ.
That's not very much! It's about the energy in one slice of dry bread. My exercise tracker
logs a brisk 30 min up-hill walk at more like 1000 kJ. Which is probably about right if you factor
in the 25% efficiency of converting food into muscular work.
How about walking or running on the flat? Why do you spend energy (say) walking
around Lake Burley Griffin? Or running the 100m sprint at the olympics? There is no height
gain. There is no friction - your feet are not sliding along the ground. There is wind drag - but it's
pretty small. Walking around the inner basin of Lake Burley Griffin takes me around an hour to
cover the 5km, so my speed is 5000/3600 = 1.4m/s. If we assume I have a cross-sectional area of
1m2 and a drag coefficient of 1, then the drag force is
So the energy is force times distance - i.e. 5 kJ. Tiny.
Running the 100m at Usain Bolt's speed (12 m/s), the drag force is larger due to the
greater speed - around 72N. But that's still only a small fraction of the 1000 N force Usain exerts.
And over 100m, the work done is only 7kJ - minuscule. It is a lot more significant at bicycle
speeds - indeed drag is often the limiting factor for cycling races. But for running, it will only
make tiny fraction of a second differences in time - enough maybe to establish world records, but
not the dominant energy drain.
So where does the energy go when running or walking? You have to put in kinetic energy
to accelerate up to your running or walking speed - but that's also pretty small, for the Usain Bolt
sprint the kinetic energy is:

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So where does the energy go when running?
I've seen a lot of different answers written down in various places, but most of them don't
make sense. One common answer is that when a runner puts the front foot down, their body has
to rise up. But if you look at movies of runners, it is clear that the centre of mass of their body
doesn't move up or down very much.
Let's say Usain Bolt's centre of mass moves up 20cm every stride (which is almost
certainly too big). His mass is around 100kg, and he runs the 100m sprint in around 50 paces. So
he has to raise his body by 0.2m a total of 50 times, so the energy is 50 mgh = 10 kJ. Still pretty
small.
I think that the energy is mostly used in accelerating the back leg forward each stride.
Let's imagine that the bottom part of his leg has a mass of around 5kg (probably an
underestimate), and he needs to accelerate it from rest (at the back of his stride) up to 24 m/s
(double his speed, to bring it forward in time for the next stride.
So the kinetic energy per stride is
But he has to do this 50 times, hence requiring around 70 kJ. An order of magnitude more
than the other forms of energy loss.
Many books analyse the swing of legs differently - they model it as a pendulum. A
pendulum of length L swings with a period of

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which for a leg, with its centre of mass ~ 0.5m below the hips, gives a period of around
1.3 sec. That feels about right - if I relax my leg muscles and swing one leg while standing on
tip-toe with the other, it takes ~ a second to swing forward.
So if you move at around 1 stride per second, this natural pendulum motion will do the
work for you. This would therefore be a very economical mode of transport. But it's not fast - if
each stride is around 1m, this gives you a speed of roughly 1m/s which is 3.6km/hr. Which is
indeed a typical walking pace. So normal walking uses the natural pendulum swing to make your
stride very efficient. But it won't win any Olympic races - for that, you need to take strides far
more rapidly (5 per second for Usain Bolt), and that burns energy.
So for the 100m sprint, Usain Bolt is exerting around 100 kJ in 10 sec, which is 10 kW
power. Factor in the 25% efficiency, and the power consumed in a whopping 40 kW. This is
comparable to the power of a car driving to Sydney at 110 km/hr! It's vastly more than the power
consumed in any longer lasting activity.
But bear in mind that one chocolate bar contains around 1000 kJ. A world record in the
100m consumes about 40% of a chocolate bar of energy...
Limiting Factors
So we've worked out the sort of energies required to power human activity. Are these a
limiting factor?
Brainstorming, there are a few possible ways in which this energy could be limiting.
1. It's hard to get enough oxygen to the cells (out of breath)
2. You overheat (can't get rid of the waste heat fast enough)
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There are some other possibilities, like inability to store enough food, or get rid of waste
prodyucts fast enough, or insufficient circulation to get the food and oxygen into the cells fast
enough. But let's focus on these two.
Diffusion
To get oxygen into the muscle cells, there is a three-step process. Firstly, it diffuses from
the air in the lungs into the bloodstream nearby. Secondly, the blood is pumped into a vast
number of tiny capillaries. And thirdly, the oxygen diffuses from the blood into the cells. A
similar process applies to food and the waste products.
So the first and last steps are diffusion. What is this, and could it be a limiting factor?
Let's say we open a bottle of perfume in a room with no air currents. How could the smell
spread? To begin with, you'd have a high concentration of perfume molecules just near the
mouth of the bottle, and none anywhere else. But these perfume molecules will move off at high
speed in both directions. They will rapidly crash into air molecules and head off in random
directions. Some will head back towards the perfume bottle, but some will keep on moving
outwards.
This sort of motion is known mathematically as a "random walk". On average the
molecules don't go anywhere - as many go from left to right as go from right to left. But they
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spread out. You can use statistics to estimate how much the distribution spreads out - the
(sigma) width in the graph above. If each step is a distance l, and there has been time for n steps,
then
Why the square root of n? You might think that with n steps of length l, you would go a
distance nl. And that's true if all those steps were in the same direction. But the odds of all the
steps being in the same direction become very small if you have a lot of steps. In one second, for
example, you'd have 1010 steps - if there is a 50% chance of each step being in either direction (to
stick in 1D for simplicity sake), the odds of all being in the same direction are
which is a very small number!
On the other hand, the odds of a molecule having exactly the same number of positive
and negative steps and hence ending up where it began is also very low. In 1D you can show
mathematically that you end up with a Gaussian distribution (bell curve) of standard deviation
sigma, which is equal to the step length times the square root of the number of steps. This is
actually the same maths behind when averaging multiple experimental measurements, the
uncertainty goes down as the square root of the number of measurements (i.e. if you had 100
opinion polls each with an uncertainty of 3% and you average them, the resultant average will
have an uncertainty of 3% divided by the square root of 100 - i.e. 0.3%. That is, if the errors are
random and not systematic). We will talk about this in the labs.
So how far will our perfume go? If each step is around 10-7 m, and you have 1010 steps in
a second, then after one second,

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So the smell will spread out by about 1cm in a second. How about an hour? That is 3600
seconds, so 3.6x1013 steps, so the distance is around 0.6m. Not very far. And because the
distance depends on the square root of the time, waiting ten hours only increases the distance by
the square root of ten - around a factor of three.
In reality smells spread around rooms much faster than this - which tells us that diffusion
is not the dominant effect - usually convection or other air currents are much faster.
In water, because the density is roughly 1000 times greater, the mean free path is 1000
times smaller, so in a second, you will only go a distance of about 10 micro-metres.
Lung Size
This small diffusion constant is a big problem for life-forms. It means that oxygen will
only diffuse over distances of a micro-metres on reasonably short time-scales.
For single-celled life-forms, this isn't a problem. Diffusion can supply them with all the
oxygen they need, because they are only a few micro-metres in size. But for anything bigger than
a microbe, it is a real problem. Larger organisms need specialist organs such a gills or lungs to
get enough oxygen into their bloodstream.
The oxygen supply in a human involves three steps. Firstly, the oxygen must diffuse
through the surface of the lungs into the bloodstream. The blood must then carry it in a timely
fashion to within ~ 10 microns of every cell. And then diffusion will do the last step, carrying
oxygen into the cells and around them to where it is needed.
The biggest problem here is the first step - getting enough oxygen to diffuse through the
surface of the lung into the bloodstream. The human body requires more than 1020 oxygen
molecules per second, and to get that much to diffuse through a membrane, it needs a surface
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area of tens of metres! See the book Zoological Physics by B.K. Ahlborn (Springer 2004) for the
full derivation.
But how can we possibly fit a surface area of tens of square metres into a human body
that's only one or two metres tall?
And in fact, the internal surface area of the human lungs is around 80 square metres!
How can you get such an enormous surface area into the volume of the lungs (less than 0.1 cubic
metres?) It's done by having the interior surface of the lungs covered with vast numbers of
alveoli - little circular air sacs only around 100 microns in radius. That means each has a surface
area of which is around 10-7 m2. So we need more than 108 of them. But as each only
occupies a volume of around
you can easily fit this into the lung volume.
In fact, the square-cube law is at work here - if you made the alveoli smaller, you could
presumably fit an even bigger surface area in, and hence get more oxygen.
So - getting enough oxygen into the body is a formidable challenge, but there is a
solution - lungs with incredibly convoluted interior surfaces - and there is no really obvious
reason why you couldn't make these surfaces more convoluted still, and hence get even more
oxygen in. But it will be challenging.
At the other end of the process, how do you get oxygen close enough to every muscle cell
(i.e. within a few tens of microns) so it can diffuse in? The body's answer is a vast number (~
1010) of tiny veins called capillaries, each only around 1 microns thick and 1mm long. There are
so many of these that they pass close to every cell, so diffusion can transport oxygen in and
waste products out.
#
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Compost Piles
This isn't directly relevant to human performance, but it's cool - this diffusion calculation
also explains how to prevent a compost pile from smelling. In a compost pile, bacteria and fungi
break down organic material, consuming oxygen and generating heat in the process.
A compost pile will have a network of tiny air gaps throughout it.
Heat generated by the decomposition inside heats the air, which causes it to rise and flow
out through the top. This in turn sucks cool air in at the bottom, bringing fresh oxygen into the
compost pile. But if you get closed-in passages, they will fill with stagnant air. For these
passages, only diffusion will allow oxygen to get in. And we've just seen that oxygen can only
diffuse over distances of centimetres. So if you have dead-end crevices longer than this, the
decomposition can use up all the oxygen, leading to anaerobic areas, which are the source of bad
smells.
So the art of producing effective compost piles is to make sure there are plenty of
continuous air passages through it. This is normally done by turning it over regularly, and
making sure that it is not too wet - as water tends to block the air passages.
Getting rid of heat
So now we get to the last potential limiting factor - getting rid of heat. Remember - no
machine is 100% efficient. Most (including muscles) are only 20-30% efficient, so 70-80% of
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the energy ends up being wasted as heat. If this heat builds up in a body, eventually it would kill
you.
We know that athletes get very hot and sweaty, so this is clearly a potential issue. It's also
an issue in many other situations. For example, many modern computers are limited by cooling,
not by microprocessor speed.
When you supply heat to an object, first of all it will heat up. You can calculate how
much using the specific heat capacity. But as the object gets hotter, it will start to lose more and
more heat to its surroundings. Eventually it will get so hot that the heat lost balances the heat
supplied, and you will be in equilibrium.
When doing a heating calculation, the first thing to do is work out which limiting case
you are in. Are you just starting to warm something up, in which case you need the physics of
specific heat capacities. Or has it come into equilibrium, in which case you should balance heat
in and heat out. We'll see later in the course how to deal with the intermediate situation where
both bits of physics apply - it's complicated!
Which regime are we in for the human body?
A human has a mass of around 70 kg, and is mostly made of water, which has a specific
heat capacity of around 4200 J/kg/K. So the energy needed to raise your temperature by 1 degree
is 70x4000 ~ 300 kJ.
Now if you remember, walking up Mt Ainslie required around 1000 kJ. If 75% of that
ends up as heat, that would raise a body's temperature by 2-3 degrees. Which is enough to make
you very sick indeed - raising the body's temperature from 37C to 40C is very serious. A jog
could well generate twice that amount of energy, which would raise your temperature to around
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43 degrees, which would kill you. So for any prolonged exercise like this, the human body must
clearly get rid of most of this heat. So you are probably in an equilibrium situation.
For a very short burst of exercise, like a 100m spring, the energy used up is a few
hundred kJ (~ 100 kJ of work done, multiply by 3-4 to get the heat generated). Which might be
bearable - but a one degree rise in core temperature is not a good thing. So even for short
activity, you really want to lose some of the heat.
So how can a human body lose heat? There are basically three ways:
Radiation
Heat is conducted through the skin and clothes and into the air around the body, and then
carried away by wind or convection.
Evaporation - water/seat on your skin evaporates and carries away heat.
Let's look at these in turn.
Radiation
Everything (that's at a temperature above absolute zero, which means everything...) emits
electromagnetic radiation. Why?
Remember - the fundamental idea of statistical thermodynamics is equipartition - on
average, energy will be shared between every possible form. Some energy will be in motion,
some in vibration, some in rotation etc, and on average, as the atoms jiggle around and collide,
the energy in each will even out. It turns out that this can be used to calculate thermal emission.
The basic idea: empty space is be full of electric and magnetic fields. And electric and
magnetic fields can contain energy. If you put some empty space near an object of temperature
T, then energy can pass back and forth between the fields in this empty space and the jiggling
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atoms in the object. For example, an electric field can accelerate electrons and protons in the
object, and a jiggling charge in the object will produce electric and magnetic fields.
Now let us imagine that these interactions are really strong. In this case, energy is easily
shared between the thermal energy of the atoms and the electric and magnetic field energy of the
empty space. So each form of electric and magnetic energy will have the same 1/2kT that each
type of motion and vibration of the atoms has.
This situation is called a "Black Body". Black, because a black object is one that interacts
strongly with light (for example, by absorbing all the light that falls on it). And in this situation,
you can calculate the radiation field in the empty space. You'll see this calculation in 2nd year
thermodynamics.
For our current purposes, the key result from this calculation is the Stefan-Boltzmann
equation, telling you the total power of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a black body:
where P is the power emitted, A the surface area, (the Stefan-
Boltzmann constant), and T is the temperature in Kelvin.
What wavelengths does this radiation come out at? That's given by the Wien's
displacement law:
where b is Wien's displacement constant, 2.9x10-3 m K. For a human body at 36C
(273+36 K), this corresponds to a wavelength of around 9 micro-metres, in the mid-IR.
Now this is the emission from a black body - an object that interacts strongly with the
surrounding electric and magnetic fields - so strongly that it is in equilibrium with them. How
realistic is that?
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Well - very few objects are true black bodies, but many come fairly close, at least at some
wavelengths. You can crudely approximate the non-black-body nature of real objects by putting
in an efficiency factor, so
where the efficiency is called the emissivity, and would be 1 for a dark black object,
and as low as 0.01 for a highly polished mirror. So for Ninja purposes you can probably
approximate it as 0.5 or 1, except for very light shiny objects. For human skin, at the infra-red
wavelengths where we mostly radiate, the emissivity is about 0.93 for both light and dark
skinned people (Watmough & Oliver 1968,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v219/n5154/abs/219622a0.html) so we are pretty close to
being black bodies (at visible light wavelengths dark skinned people have emissivities of around
0.8 while pale skinned people have values of around 0.4, but this doesn't really affect radiation as
humans are not hot enough to emit anything at those wavelengths).
Human radiation
So - how much radiation would a naked human emit? An average adult man has a surface
area of 1.9 m2, while for a woman the typical area is around 1.6 m2. Let's call it two square
metres for ninja purposes. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and assuming an emissivity of 1
and a skin temperature of 35C, the power radiated comes out as 1020W.
But that's too simple. Because we will also be absorbing radiation from our skin. If we
are surrounded by objects at some temperature T, they will all be emitting radiation which will
hit us. How can we calculate the energy we gain via radiation?
149
Well, there's a trick we can use! If we were surrounded by objects at the same
temperature as us, then then energy we receive would have to balance the energy we radiate -
we'd all be in thermal equilibrium with our surroundings and with the energy field.
So - if we're surrounded by an environment at temperature Ten, the heat we gain from it is
just what we would lose if we were at the same temperature - i.e.
So how much heat do we gain from the environment? If the environment is at 20C, this
comes out as 836W, so on average we're losing 1020-836 = 184W.
If it's colder outside, say 0C, then we lose 391W via radiation, while if the outside
temperature approaches 35C, we won't lose anything.
So on a 20C day, we lose more energy than our resting metabolic rate from radiation.
Indeed radiation could keep us cool with moderate exercise. But even if it is freezing outside, it
isn't enough to cool down someone exercising really hard.
It is a problem if you are trying to keep warm in a cold climate - radiation losses can be
substantial. The solution is clothing. Your clothing will also radiate energy, but if the outside
layers of your clothes are at a lower temperature than your skin, they will radiate less. Some
coats and emergency blankets have reflective coating on their insides, to reflect the thermal
radiation from the body back, which will also help.
Conductivity
Conduction is one of the ways heat can move through an object (the others are
convection and radiation), and is physically very similar to diffusion. Like diffusion, heat is
conducted from regions with a lot of it to regions with a little, and the rate of flow is proportional
to the temperature gradient, so:

150
(in 1D), where H is the heat flow, k the thermal conductivity, A the area and T the
temperature.
In a gas, conductivity is virtually identical to diffusion - fast moving atoms from the hot
region diffuse through the slower moving colder atoms. In liquids and solids things are more
complicated - coordinated vibrations (photons) can carry heat around, and in electrical
conductors, free electrons knocked by fast moving atoms in one part of the metal carry their
energy large distances before bouncing off other colder atoms and passing on their energy.
It is possible to estimate the thermal conductivity of air in much the same way as we
calculated the diffusion constant, and you get k~0.025 w m-1 K-1. Feel free to do this calculation -
it's not hard. Though in practice this only applies to tiny bits of air - if you have a large quantity
of air, any temperature difference will cause convection to take place, spreading the heat around
much more rapidly. However, this value of k is close to what you get with many insulators, such
as the batts used in roof insulation, which are indeed mostly made up of air divided up into small
spaces to prevent convection. It's also what you get with double-glazed windows, where the
cavity between the two sheets of glass must be small enough to stop convection. Or with much
clothing, which traps air between the fibres.
How good would a 10cm thick layer of roofing insulation be in keeping a house warm in
winter? Let's say we have a 100 square metre house, and a temperature inside of 20C, and
outside of 0C. dT/dx is thus 20/0.1 = 200 K/m.
The heat flow through A=100 m2 of this is thus:

151
Is this a plausible amount? Most electric heaters seem to have power-ratings of 1000-
2000 W, which is comparable, and we know heaters can keep a house warm, so this looks like a
sensible figure.
Over a night, how much heat do we lose? Let's say 10 hours, 3600 seconds in an hour, so
the heat loss through the insulated roof will be around 500x10x3600 = 18 MJ. Gas in Canberra
costs around 2.5 cents per mega-Joule, so it costs around 45c to offset the heat leak through the
roof. Of course there will be other heat leaks - through windows, walls, floor etc. But this
suggests that insulation of this thickness can greatly reduce heating bills.
Metal has a much greater thermal conductivity due to the movement of free electrons
carrying heat from hot areas to cool - for steel is is around k~ 50 W m-1 K-1 while for copper it is
k ~ 385 W m-1 K-1.
Imagine that you put a teaspoon in your tea/coffee (at around 100C). How hot will the
handle get? We know from experience that it is possible to stir your tea without your fingers
getting burned, but we also know that if you leave a spoon in your tea for a while, the end will be
too hot hot to touch comfortably. So we are expecting it to take some tens of seconds to heat up.
Is this what the physics predicts?
So what's our model here? One end of the spoon is at 100C, while the other starts at room
temperature. Heat will be conducted down the handle - which we'll assume is made of steel and
is around 1mm thick and 10mm wide - i.e. A~ 0.001x0.003 = 3x10-6 m2. The handle of the spoon
is around 10cm long, so dT/dx ~ (100-20)/0.1 = 800 K/m. That's the initial figure - as the handle
warms up the temperature gradient will decrease.
So how fast is heat going to flow up the spoon handle?

152
So that's not a lot - but is it enough to heat up the handle of the spoon? Let's say the top of
the handle is 1mm thick, 10mm wide and 3cm long. It's volume is thus a whopping ~10-7 m3.
The density of steel is around 8000 kg/m3, so the mass is ~8x10-4 kg. As we saw earlier, the
specific heat capacity of iron is around 500 J kg-1 K-1. So it takes around 500x8x10-4 = 0.4 J to
warm up the handle by one degree. So if we're supplying 0.12W, that means it will take around 3
seconds to warm up by one degree - so perhaps a minute or two to heat it up to uncomfortable
temperatures. Which seems about right, in my experience with teaspoons!
How effective is conduction at cooling down athletes? Conduction through the skin is
quite fast, as blood flow brings the heat up to very close to the surface. The major barrier to heat
loss is conduction into the surrounding air.
If you were naked on a calm day, the heat will be conducted into the air, until the air is
hot enough that it begins to convect - i.e. the hot air near the skin rises and flows away, being
replaced by cooler air. If there is some wind, or a fan blowing, or you are running, the heat might
only need to be conducted through a thin layer of stagnant air right against your body.
If we assume the air needs to be conducted 1cm before being blown or convected away,
then the energy loss rate for a person with a two square metre surface area is
(assuming a 35 degree skin temperature and 20 degree air temperature). A windy day
would increase this by reducing the distance the heat needs to move, as would a colder day.
That's pretty small, compared to even the energy consumed by a resting person, let alone
someone exercising.
Clothes are effectively layers of stagnant air trapped against your body, and so their
effect can be calculated similarly.

153
So the conduction heat loss depends a lot on environmental conditions. Meteorologists
have models of a typical human in typical clothes that they use to calculate wind chill factors -
how much more heat you lose when the wind reduces the thickness of the stagnant air layer.
But basically, this heat loss rate is not going to be sufficient for anyone exercising, unless
it is very cold and windy outside. We will need some other mechanism to keep us cool.
Evaporation
So radiation and conduction are probably not going to carry away enough heat to keep an
athlete alive through any sustains exercise, especially on a hot day. So what else can we do?
For human, the answer is sweat - cover our skins with a layer of water which can
evaporate off to cool us.
The latent heat of vaporisation of water is 2.3x106 J/kg, which is how much heat every
litre of evaporating sweat carries away.
How fast does water evaporate? The physics of this is complicated - it depends on the
relative humidity of the air, the temperature and the wind speed. You can find tables of
evaporation rates for different conditions on the web and in engineering handbooks.
But for a rough figure, we can look at experimental results. Meteorologists measure
evaporation rates all the time (they are an important figure for agriculture). They do this by
putting a pan of water outside and measuring how rapidly the level goes down. In Canberra the
pan evaporation is 110mm per month (200 mm per month in summer). In the outback it can be
up to 420 mm/month in summer, while in hot but humid places like Singapore the evaporation
rate is only around 120 mm/month. 1mm per month on a one square metre area would be 10-
3
x1x1x1000 = 1 kg m-3 per month, which is 4x10-7 kg m-2 s-1.
154
So let's say you are going for a run in Canberra in summer. The evaporation rate here is
around 8x10-5 kg m-2 s-2. If you have a 2 square metre surface area, and your skin is entirely
covered in sweat, then you could lose 2x8x10-5 ~ 1.6x10-4 kg/s, or 0.6 litres per hour of water.
Which sounds about right for an average day or night in summer - you'd lose more in mid-day on
a hot sunny day, and less on a cool humid night. How much energy does this carry away?
Multiply by the latent heat and you get 368 W.
So this is the biggest heat loss - enough to cope with reasonably strenuous exercise, just
about. But if you were in Singapore on a hot humid day, your heat loss would be much less.
Conclusions
It seems to me that inability to get rid of surplus heat is the major factor limiting animal
performance. It seems clear we could have stronger muscles. Oxygen flow is a limit, but there
seems no obvious reason why we couldn't redesign our lungs and circulation system to get more
oxygen in, if we needed to.
But any strenuous exercise really pushes the limits of our ability to get rid of heat.
Radiation can be effective if you are naked and doing your exercise on a cold day, but won't
work if the outside temperature approaches body temperature. Conduction similarly requires
special conditions to be very effective (particularly a cold wind), and won't work if its hot and
calm.
Sweating is the most effective way to get rid of heat, but is limited by the rate at which
water will evaporate from out surface area. In hot humid places, even sweating can't get rid of
the heat that would be worked up by strenuous exercise.
So what would happen if we had a super-hero like the flash operating at ten times the
normal metabolic rate (much as mice do). Mice can get away with this because they are small -
155
the square-cube law means that the ratio of surface area to body mass is much higher for mice, so
they can get rid of energy efficiently. But for the flash, he is limited to the same 2 square metres
that we have.
A normal human doing heavy exercise might be burning 400W. So let's say a superhero
(the Flash?) burns ten times as much - 4000 W. He can radiate away around 200 on a 20C day,
conduct away around 10W, and sweat away around 400, leaving around 3600 W stuck in his
body. It takes 300 kJ to raise the body's temperature by a degree, so his temperature would
increase by 1 degree roughly every minute. He'd die in about 7 minutes, and spontaneously
combust in an hour or two of activity. SO super-human feats are only possible in very short
bursts, followed by cool-down time. Which is very much what Usain Bolt does.
So if we want super-fast aliens or robots, we need to find some more effective way to get
rid of heat. Elephants use radiators (their ears) which they pump heat into via blood flow. But
despite this, elephants need a low metabolic rate to stop combusting.
This same problem applies to modern computers. They are usually run slower than they
are capable of, because the limiting factor is how fast the heat can be dissipated. High end
gaming computers will use water cooling and radiators, while standard computers use fans. But
its not easy - especially for smartphone or tablet processors where you really don't want to use a
fan.

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Week 0: Introduction

What we're trying to achieve in this course.

strategies", "Modelling", and even "Thinking like a physicist".

future look like this:

Will science and technology continue to advance, leading us into an unimaginable

earth to fight over finite resources?

Is scientific progress slowing down?

anything like such a big effect on peoples lives.

mosquito) that our technologies cannot even come close to matching.

So which is it going to be - science grinding to a halt, or accelerating into the future?

universities, who will?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stagnation - a book arguing the progress is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Against_the_Machine - a book arguing the opposite.

called "Back-of-the-envelope" or "Fermi problems".

Why do Ninja Physics?

properly and get the "right answer"?

You will probably have no idea where to start.

There are three basic principles of Ninja Physics:

Build a simplified model

Focus on what matters most

situation in terms of very basic principles.

Week 1: The Physics of Normal Cars

characters". He was bemoaning what he sees as a slow-down in technological progress. While

transport and energy are advancing very slowly.

(graphs from http://foundersfund.com/the-future/ )

commercial flying car, yet it never quite seems to "take off".

and can we get around it some-how?

principles" is all about.

Coming up with a model

the energy go"? We know cars need energy to move. Why?

rest and accelerates, it's gaining kinetic energy.

needed to get a box on wheels to Sydney.

potential energy every time it goes up a hill.

Let's consider these in turn and see which is most important.

Starting and stopping

How much energy does it take to accelerate a car?

2000 kg), so let's call it 1500 kg, so the energy needed is

which is quite good enough for now.

under-inflated tyres would have a larger value.

How can we estimate this?

but we should at least be able to estimate a rough number.

So this suggests that the rolling resistance of a car is around 300N.

300N is probably about right.

How about wind resistance (also known as drag)?

the air swirls around in a messy way as an object pushes through.

Reynolds number is around 2x105, well into the turbulent regime.

And the great importance of speed makes sense too.

overcome drag while driving to Sydney is also around 108 J.

and stopping is negligible in comparison.

how much it should need!

petrol into motion.

engines are fundamentally limited in their efficiency.

used to drive the car.

so they can run hotter, without knocking).

around the car.

car is heating up the Hume Highway and environs by around 6x104 W.

somewhere, but not a factor of ten.

efficiency of current ones, unless you could:

made very little difference.

actual combustion energy. This is very powerful.

enough that our estimate isn't ridiculous.

Go to first principles if you really want to understand something.

Week 2: Flying cars

What's different with flying?