Physics is the science of matter and its motion, space-time and energy. Physics describes many forms of energy - such as kinetic energy, electrical energy, and mass; and the way energy can change from one form to another. Everything surrounding to us is made of matter and Physics explains matter as combinations of fundamental particles which are interacting through fundamental forces. It will not be an exaggeration if it is said that Nature is almost Physics (apart from the fact that the word Physics itself is derived from Greek "physis" meaning nature).

Physics is all around us. We can find Physics as the backbone for any daily life example such as an electric light, electricity, the working of our vehicle, wristwatch, cell phone, CD player, radio, plasma TV set, computer, and - the list goes on. Physics is also a necessity in solving our future problems.

Some people may believe that 20th and 21st century PHYSICS RESEARCH has less of a direct impact on their daily lives than biology, chemistry, engineering, and other fields. Perhaps they think of physics as an abstract, enigmatic, or purely academic endeavor. Others think that physics only contributes to national defense and medical imaging.

Given below the facts are sufficient to dispel those myths.

Nearly everyone would agree that the computer, the transistor, and the World Wide Web are among the greatest inventions of the 20th century. The electronic digital computer, the transistor, the laser, and even the World Wide Web were all invented by physicists. These inventions make up the foundation of modern technology.
For example, one area of active research that shows promise for broadly impacting society is superconductivity. The first "low temperature" superconductor was discovered in 1911 by physicist Kamerlingh Onnes (1913 Nobel Prize in Physics), and this class of materials was first explained mathematically in 1957 by physicists Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (1972 Nobel Prize in Physics). The first "high-temperature" superconductor was discovered in 1986 by Bednorz and Müller (1987 Nobel Prize in Physics). As if the above prizes for research on superconductivity were not enough, the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics is also related to superconductivity.

Before talking more about specific inventions, let us first learn about the fundamental science that made them possible.

Quantum Mechanics and the Electron:

When physicists such as Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, and Einstein formulated quantum mechanics from 1900 to 1930, they were trying to understand the fundamental laws of the universe, not invent something of great economic importance. But it turns out they did, as we shall explain below. And when the great physicist Paul Dirac said in 1929 that all of chemistry could, in principle, be explained in terms of the newly formulated theory of quantum mechanics, probably few people believed him. But it turns out he was right. As far as we know, the structure of every atom in the universe is determined by quantum mechanics. Today, all chemists and material scientists are trained extensively in quantum mechanics. Biologists like Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of DNA, realized many years ago that even biology is ultimately governed by the laws of physics and quantum mechanics.

A thorough understanding of quantum mechanics is necessary to engineer solid state devices such as transistors. Transistors are the building blocks of electronics and computers. It is impossible to understanding semiconductors (the building blocks of transistors), or any material for that matter, with classical physics alone (i.e. physics known before the discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity). The physics of lasers and the interaction of light with matter are described by what's called quantum electrodynamics. Even the light entering your eye from this computer screen requires quantum mechanics to understand! Elementary particle physics describes the fundamental building blocks of the universe in the language of relativistic quantum field theory, which is basically quantum mechanics mixed with Einstein's relativity. Without quantum mechanics, the "information age" (and much of modern science) would not exist today.

This discovery of the electron by physicist J.J. Thompson in 1897 was probably underappreciated when it occurred, just like the development of quantum mechanics. After all, in 1897 it probably sounded like a waste of money to do experiments on a particle that is too tiny to ever see. But of course, now our civilization is dependent on electronics, chemistry, materials science, medicine, etc.--all of which require an understanding of the electron

(i) Computers:

The first electronic digital computer was built in the basement of the physics department at Iowa State University in 1939 by Professor John Atanasoff, who had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin, and his physics graduate student Clifford Berry


It is indeed the case that Atanasoff and Berry do not receive the proper recognition, at least from the general public, who have no idea that an electronic digital computer was created as early as 1939, nor that it was designed and built by physicists (perhaps many think Bill Gates invented the computer?). It is amazing to think that the computer industry, now worth in the hundreds of billions of dollars, owes its existence to a brilliant physics professor and his talented graduate student, working away at Iowa State University with a $650 research grant (no that is not a typo), driven by their own curiosity to think, design, and build something truly novel. It is certain that they never dreamed their modest machine would have such a profound impact on the world.
The second electronic digital computer, also proposed and designed by a physicist, was completed in 1945. This computer, called the ENIAC, was largely based on Atanasoff's pioneering work.

(ii) The Transistor:

In 1947, young physicists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey inserted two gold contacts 1/64th of an inch apart from each other into a slab of germanium and, by wiring up some electronics, discovered that the signal coming out of this semiconductor had at least 18 times the power of the signal going in--in other words they had achieved amplification! Walter Brattain wrote "This circuit was actually spoken over and by switching the device in and out a distinct gain in speech level could be heard and seen on the scope presentation with no noticeable change in quality."


The physicists--John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley--had invented the transistor, which garnered them the Nobel Prize in 1956 and opened the way to the telecommunications revolution and the information age.

The transistor is the building block of all modern electronics and computers (everything from a battery operated watch, to a coffee maker, to a cell phone, to a supercomputer). Microprocessors for modern personal computers, such as the Intel Pentium 4 Processor, contain around 55 million transistors each. Unless you printed this page and are reading it in the words, there are millions of transistors within a meter of you at this time.

Before the invention of the transistor, computers used vacuum tubes. It took one of these large vacuum tubes to do the same job as a transistor, the smallest of which today are only 80 atoms wide. Computers using vacuum tubes filled huge rooms, but were not powerful by today's standards. In 1945 the U.S. Army built a vacuum tube computer called the ENIAC, proposed by and developed in part by physicist John W. Mauchly, who borrowed many of the ideas and design from physicist John Atanasoff. The ENIAC cost about $500,000, took up a room the size of a suburban home, weighed 60,000 lbs, used 18,000 vacuum tubes, and was the fastest computer of its time. The vacuum tubes and cooling system used huge amounts of power--$650 per hour worth of electricity to be exact.

But despite its size and cost, the vacuum tube-based ENIAC was only capable of about 1000 math operations per second, compared to around 1 billion operations per second for today's transistor-based personal computers. To put this in perspective, sometimes I perform physics calculations on a modern desktop computer that take about 30 minutes to run. It's a good thing I am not using the ENIAC, or these calculations would each take 60 years! Of course, modern supercomputers are even faster than desktops. A calculation that takes just 15 seconds on today's fastest supercomputer would take 19,000 years on the ENIAC, meaning we would have had to start the calculation during the ice age for it to be finished by now.

Thanks to transistors, today's personal computers can pack all their computational power into a tiny microchip the size of cracker that costs only a couple hundreds bucks and uses very little electricity. The affordability, small size, and power of modern computers and electronics would never have been achieved without the invention of the transistor. The information age as we know it simply would not exist.

(iii) The World Wide Web (WWW):

In the 1980s, the thousands of physicists at CERN PARTICLE PHYSICS LABORATORY in Geneva needed a better way to exchange information with their colleagues working in different universities and institutes all over the world. Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate from Oxford University with 1st class Honors in Physics, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) at CERN in 1990 to meet this demand. Along with creating the first web browser and web server, he developed the software conventions that are key to the Web's usefulness, with acronyms like URL (uniform resource locator) and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). Berners-Lee's supervisor was physicist D. M. Sendall, who gave him the initial go-ahead on the project.


Between 1990 and 1993, the Web was mostly used by scientists to collaborate their research. In 1993 it began to spread to the rest of the world, and now already the majority of Americans surf the Web. The number of websites has grown from just 130 in June 1993 to around 9 million in 2002. Now over a trillion dollars worth of commerce takes place over the Internet every year! Much of this e-commerce is done over the World Wide Web. What began as a better way for physicists to manage information and communicate--the World Wide Web--is now a vast "global information superhighway," accessible to all.

(iv) Lasers:

The underlying theory of photons which made the invention of the laser possible was first developed by Albert Einstein in 1905, for which he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1954 the first microwave laser was built by physicist Charles Townes. The first optical laser was built in 1960 by physicist Theodore Maiman. The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov for their research on both microwave and optical lasers.

CD players, CD-ROMs, CD-burners, and DVD players all use lasers to read data. Without fundamental research in physics by Einstein, the inventors of the laser, and others, the CD and other applications of the laser such as fiber optics representing industries worth billions of dollars would not exist. It is ironic that, like so many other discoveries in physics, the laser was at first thought by many to have no practical uses whatsoever.

Physics research has benefited society in various ways:-

• Physics Clears the Air - the Environment
• Physics Stimulates Industry - Lasers
• Astrophysics Launches Technology - Astrophysics
• Physics Shows the Way - Global Positioning System
• Physics Saves Lives - Medical Imaging
• Physics Creates an Industry - Computers

Notices/Circulars

Assignments : I Semester (2011 Batch)

Unit-I: INTERFERENCE OF LIGHT

Unit-I A (Submission Date: 30/09/2011)
Unit-I B (Submission Date: 30/09/2011)


Unit-III: DIFFRACTION OF LIGHT

Unit-III A (Submission Date: 26/11/2011)
Unit-III B (Submission Date: 26/11/2011)

Previous year’s papers of RTU (Main/Back) Exam (For practice)

2008-April (old scheme)
2008-June (old scheme)
2010-February (old scheme)
2010-June (old scheme)
2011-February(old scheme)
2011-July (old scheme)
2010- I Semester (new scheme)
2010- II Semester(new scheme)
2011- I Semester(new scheme)
2011- II Semester(new scheme)

Batch 2010

Seminar (Power Point Presentation) program was organized by department of physics in the second semester in which almost every student has performed with their capabilities. Among the students, following students have been found very well in preparing and presenting the seminar.

Hitesh Yadav & Group	Newton’s Ring Experiment
Sidhima Saini & Group	Laser
Samarth Dixit & Group	Conversion of Galvanometer to Ammeter
Yogesh Verma & Group	Optical Fiber
Deepali Jain & Group	Sextant
Ankita Soni & Group	Dispersive Power of Prism
Bhuvnesh Ojha & Group	Carey’s Foster Bridge
Ronak Dhadhich & Group	Balastic Galvanometer
Suneha & Group	Fiber Optics

Few power point presentations are given for illustration:
Alphadecay-Shashank
Ballastic Galvanometer-RonakDhadhich's Group
Careys'FosterBridge-Bhuvesh's Group
Carey'sFosterBridge-Ridhima's Group
DispersivePower-Ankita's Group
DispersivePwer-Pallav's Group
Charging&Discharging of Capacitor-MD Shadab Khan's & Group
Sextant-DeepaliJain's Group