Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Turning point — where it appears

A place where a motion reverses because the kinetic energy has run out, and the boundary of the region a given energy permits. In a wave description it is where the local wavelength diverges and the ray picture fails, which is why a caustic and a turning point are the same object.

Named by 3 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A harmonic well. Potential energy against position, with a horizontal line at the total energy. The motion is confined to where the line lies above the curve, and the turning points are the intersections — computed by solving for them, not marked by hand.

The hill that gives it back, and the forces that do not

Potential energy turns a question about motion into a picture of a landscape. It works for gravity and springs, it fails for friction, and the difference between those two cases is the whole of what makes energy useful.

mechanics · Energy A wavefunction crossing a barrier it has not the energy for. An electron of 2 electronvolts meeting a 3 electronvolt barrier 0.3 nanometres wide, with the four matching conditions solved rather than sketched. Left of the barrier the incident and reflected waves add to a standing pattern; inside it the amplitude decays exponentially; to the right a travelling wave continues with amplitude 0.3912 of the incident one, so 15.3 per cent of the electrons get through. Classically none of them do.

The wall that is not quite a wall

A particle without enough energy to climb a barrier sometimes appears on the other side of it. The probability falls exponentially with the barrier's width, which is why the effect is invisible at ordinary scales and why it can be turned into a microscope.

quantum · Tunnelling Rays that turn round without meeting anything. Rays leaving an eye 1.5 m above a road, at 0.18°, 0.28°, 0.36°, 0.42°, 0.52° below the horizontal, in air whose refractive index is reduced by 3.0e-5 at the hot surface and recovers over 5 cm. Each is traced by integrating the ray equation, with the conserved quantity n cos θ fixed by where and how the ray set out. The shallow ones come back up without touching anything — the lowest gets to 0.6 cm above the surface and turns — and a ray that returns to eye level from below is seen as sky lying on the road. The steep ones run out of gradient first and hit it. The dividing angle is 0.444°, which is what the whole effect is made of: an unremarkable temperature difference and an angle a fiftieth the width of the Moon. Heights are exaggerated 128× against distances; at true scale every ray here would be indistinguishable from the axis. The conserved n cos θ holds to 4.3e-14 over every trace, which is what says the turns are the physics and not the integrator.

The ray that bends without a surface

Snell's law is about a boundary, and light bends in air where there is no boundary anywhere. Let the index vary continuously and the law of angles becomes a differential equation — one that carries a conserved quantity, forbids the ray from reaching certain heights, and turns a hot road into a mirror a hundred metres long.

optics · Fermat

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Potential energyBoundary conditionsConservation lawsConservative forceDeflection angleEnergy conservationEvanescent waveExponential sensitivityFermat's principleFocal lengthGradientMatter wave

All concepts