Half Term Updates
I've had a few As exams by this point, and it's nice to have a break before the next onslaught. So far, I think biology and chemistry were the exams I was most worried about and I think they went alright (but I found out that I read questions wrong on both of them afer I came out! Only 1 mark for chemistry, but I ended up describing a trend rather than explaining it in biology which could lose me 3/80 marks.) Of course, the exams which I felt most confident about and was most looking forwards to (or maybe I should say least uncomfortable with!) was physics and maths.
This year's C1 paper was pretty difficult for C1 I thought, but still, it's C1 and this year I'm studying C1, C2 and C3 - and learning bits of C4 in my free time ready for next year. So it wasn't terribly difficult, and I understood what was expected in all questions - at the moment I haven't found out that I got anything wrong, but my arithmetic is sometimes inaccurate so I don't want to jinx this just yet. The C2 paper was pretty similar, and I'm quite happy with that.
P1 went worse than maths, to be honest. I say that because almost as soon as I walked out of the exam hall, I heard people discussing answers that it turns out I'd had a bit of brain freeze on. I'd typed something wrong into a calculator I guess, and gotten 270 Ohms rather than 2700 Ohms (or something to that effect), and I'd mixed up the quark composition of the K0 and the anti-K0. In my limited defense about the second one, Hyperphysics lists the quark structure of both as a superposition state. Anyway, there's no use whining about silly mistakes.
With my group's magnetometer project, the exams have been a bit of a stumblng block and work has pretty much ceased whilst we all focus on revision. All of the physical parts have arrived and we're ready to start testing as soon as we're back, but are not yet collecting test data. I have made a few more theory posts in the meantime:
but I don't actually know the material well enough to post without prior research, and I'm probably not going to be able to post anything else interesting for another couple of weeks. The next post will probably be on the shape of dipole fields, since the Earth's field closely approximates one, but after that I don't have a solid topic that I understand to my satisfaction. Some research will hopefully change that!
Oh, and I got into the Senior Physics Challenge! This is a residential summer school hosted by Cambridge, so I'm really pleased to be invited. I'll be blogging whatever they tell us, either on the day if I can bring my laptop, or I'll make notes and endeavor to do so when I'm back. I'm really excited for this!
The only other update that might be of interest is to do with notes on this site: during half term I intend to write a set of waves notes on interference as revision for P2. I'll obviously upload them here for anyone using this site. I will also try to write some questions on waves (although, like other questions on this site, they will be intended to test understanding, not exam technique, so do some past papers too!) and if I have time amidst everything else I'll see about other question sets that I can write. I've only got a week and I've got 5 exams in the first week back, so I can't devote all of it to physics, unfortunately, but I will make a serious effort to update this site in the coming week.
Keep in Aspiring to Physics, and now go do some revision!