Oxford!
I've got an E-mail from Oxford saying that I've got a place!
I keep checking it, wondering whether it's really true. Of course it is, that would be an unbelievably mean joke to play on someone. It has the Merton College shield on it. It just hasn't totally sunk in yet, and my nerves about what to do if I didn't get in (not that that should be a big deal, I have an offer from my second choice, Nottingham, which is both lovely and great for Physics).
I also have lots of work to do around now, so I don't have any time to stop right now! The Astrophysics Olympiad is pretty soon, and the Physics Olympiad just after that. I will probably end up doing the Chemistry Olympiad as well, although I don't expect to do very well in that. In the mean time I have Chemistry assessed practicals, an FP1 mock and a Unit 4 Physics Mock. Speaking of our physics mock, we had to write practice questions for the class today and me and a friend conspired to write one doozy of a question on electric fields. (We did the same task last year for mechanics Unit 2, the end result was my question on climbing which involved, amongst other things, calculating the stretch in a climbing rope of some given Young modulus). Since we were supposed to only do electric fields, there wasn't too much choice of questions, the options boiled down to one of a few things:
1) Calculate the field due to an infinite place (it's uniform) and then do a projectile motion question based on that. Maybe include a qualitative question about edge effects on a finite place and/or projectile motion in a slightly varying field.
2) Find stable arrangements of charges
3) Maybe see if we could put together an inverse problem where you have to find a charge distribution that gives a certain field. We didn't seriously consider this since this is in general a very hard problem and most methods rely on sneakiness that wouldn't be fair to assume.
In the end, I misremembered an Olympiad question and we adapted it into a quite nice question, although it took a fair bit of work. The original question is Section 1 part (l) on the BPhO Rd.1 paper for 2013-2014, and our adaptation will be going up on the site today. A mark scheme may eventually get on site, but I would have to write it up (I did handwrite one, but I don't have it any more).
[Edit: The question as it stands almost certainly is nigh-impossible using A level physics, even with the hints included. That's partly because the hints aren't quite right, because there's just no good way to give a formula that uses gradient operators. I would assume that the problem is in fact doable, but it will require more ingenuity/elbow grease than I had originally thought]
The essence of the question ended up being quite different from the original one, but is probably of only slightly harder difficulty. The issue came from the fact that we needed three mutually attracting objects and that required the use of dipoles, which aren't covered in the specification. That meant that we needed a (long) introduction to dipoles that took up the majority of the question. Have fun!
