Real-Life Communication
Good communication skills are extremely important for physicists who do research and for physicists who teach.
In some physics experiments, there may be hundreds or even thousands of people working on different parts of a single experiment.
"Everyone on the experiment is therefore constantly coordinating their work with that of others; lecturing, writing and e-mailing about ongoing work; and asking hard questions about what other people have done and answering the questions posed by others," says Allen Mincer. He is a research physicist.
That amount of coordination and correspondence among so many different people takes good communication skills.
"This is the only way to make such a large project work," Mincer says. "It also guarantees that almost anything done on such an experiment has been checked by several experts, and increases the chances of success."
Another reason for solid communication is that new things are always being learned. What is true at one time may change as discoveries are made.
One example of this involves elementary particles. These particles are the fundamental building blocks of which matter is made. All matter is made of protons, neutrons and electrons.
- Protons are a positively charged particle present in all atoms.
- Neutrons are one of the elementary, uncharged particles of an atom.
- Electrons are a negatively charged particle found in all atoms.
"The search goes on to understand whether we now really understand what the 'elementary particles' really are, or whether there are still smaller constituents of the particles we currently know," Mincer says.
Matter at the smallest scale is made of elementary particles. They are pieces of matter that cannot be divided into anything smaller.
Since the 1770s, it has been known that every element is made up of atoms. There are iron atoms, oxygen atoms and so on. Iron is different from oxygen because its atoms are different.
Today, it is known that all matter is made up of the same basic building blocks. Although iron and oxygen and their atoms are different from each other, both of these atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons.
The difference is not what the particles are, but how they are arranged.
So these basic building blocks which all matter shares are called "elementary particles."
You're a professor of physics. These are pretty big concepts for your students who haven't studied physics before. What are some questions you could ask students to see if they're getting it?