Supercritical fluids have relatively high density but low viscosity, are there any that are good conductors?

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I have tried putting high voltage on the HV pin of the pmt, but the signal is just noise even though I have an Am-Be neutron source close by. Does any of you have experience with these kinds of detectors?

Hello /r/Physics.

It's everyone's favorite day of the week, again. Time to share (or rant about) how your research/work/studying is going and what you're working on this week.

This is a thread dedicated to collating and collecting all of the great recommendations for textbooks, online lecture series, documentaries and other resources that are frequently made/requested on /r/Physics.

If you're in need of something to supplement your understanding, please feel welcome to ask in the comments.

Similarly, if you know of some amazing resource you would like to share, you're welcome to post it in the comments.

I really want to hear how everyone got into this subject. :D

This is a dedicated thread for you to seek and provide advice concerning education and careers in physics.

If you need to make an important decision regarding your future, or want to know what your options are, please feel welcome to post a comment below.

A few years ago we held a graduate student panel, where many recently accepted grad students answered questions about the application process. That thread is here, and has a lot of great information in it.

Helpful subreddits: /r/PhysicsStudents, /r/GradSchool, /r/AskAcademia, /r/Jobs, /r/CareerGuidance

Last september I started as a high school physics teacher. The classroom I teach in is quite nice and well equipped. At the walls and cabinets there are a lot of posters about famous physicists, made by the previous physics teacher. Think about Newton, Pascal, Joule, Einstein, Coulomb, Rutherford, ... all the famous ones. (Faraday is missing, sadly)

However, there is still room for more, and right now there is not a single poster about a woman. Of course I'm going to give Marie Curie the honour she deserves, but I'm looking for more ideas about who I could hang up on the wall.

The sole criterion is that it has to be about something somewhat tangible for high school students (so no stuff like gluon interactions or christoffel symbols, if you get what I mean)

Thanks for the help and suggestions!

EDIT: Thanks everyone, for all the suggestions and interesting discussions so far. A lot of people pointed out Emmy Noether, and while I agree her discoveries are invaluable for physics, it is a bit too far fetched for high school students and above their level.

Some people pointed out Emilie du Chatelet and I think that is just perfect, as she discovered the relationship between mass, velocity and kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is something very tangible which high school students definitely understand. So when teaching kinetic energy I will be able to refer to her poster.

Recently found an essay ("The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics") by Evelyn Fox Keller on her experience in the Harvard Physics department in the late 1950s. Keller is typically seen as a sociologist or historian of science (she wrote A Feeling for the Organism, a biography on Barbara McClintock the discoverer of transposons), but she had science experiences of her own.

Quote from essay on how foundational questions were undervalued in comparison to more calculation-oriented investigated

I went to graduate school with a vision of theoretical physics as a vehicle for the deepest inquiry into nature—a vision perhaps best personified, in recent times, by Einstein. The use of mathematics to further one’s understanding of the nature of space, time, and matter represented a pinnacle of human endeavor. I went to graduate school to learn about foundations. I was taught, instead, how to do physics. In place of wisdom, I was offered skills. Furthermore, this substitution was made with moralistic fervor. It was wrong, foolhardy, indeed foolish, to squander precious time asking why. Proper humility was to bend to the grindstone and learn techniques. Contemporary physics, under the sway of operationalism, had, it seemed, dispensed with the tradition of Einstein—almost, indeed, with Einstein himself. General relativity, the most intellectually ambitious venture of the century, seemed then (wrongly) a dead subject. Philosophical considerations of any sort in the physical sciences were at an all-time low. Instead, techniques designed to calculate nth-order corrections to a theory grievously flawed at its base were the order of the day.

and on calculation mistakes, deeper questions, and humility

I needed to be humbled. Though I writhed over the banality of the assignments I was given, I did them, acknowledging that I needed in any case to learn the skills. I made frequent arithmetic errors—reflecting a tension that endures within me even today between the expansiveness of conception and the precision of execution, my personal variation perhaps of the more general polar tension in physics as a whole. When my papers were returned with the accuracy of the conception ignored and the arithmetic errors streaked with red—as if with a vengeance—I wondered whether I was studying physics or plumbing. Who has not experienced such a wrenching conflict between idealism and reality? Yet my fellow students seemed oddly untroubled. From the nature of their responses when I tried to press them for deeper understanding of the subject, I thought perhaps I had come from Mars. Why, they wondered, did I want to know? That they were evidently content with the operational success of the formulas mystified me. Even more mystifying was the absence of any appearance of the humility of demeanor that one would expect to accompany the acceptance of more limited goals. I didn’t fully understand then that in addition to the techniques of physics, they were also studying the techniques of arrogance. This peculiar inversion in the meaning of humility was simply part of the process of learning how to be a physicist. It was intrinsic to the professionalization, and what I might even call the masculinization, of an intellectual discipline.

Entire essay is quite interesting and would likely resonate with many who have studied theoretical physics.

This thread is a dedicated thread for you to ask and answer questions about concepts in physics.

Homework problems or specific calculations may be removed by the moderators. We ask that you post these in /r/AskPhysics or /r/HomeworkHelp instead.

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