Swans on Tea

No, it’s a DIY Michelson interferometer by the Celtic Mad Scientist.
In a standard Michelson interferometer, the beamsplitter would actually go at 90º to the shown orientation, so that each beam hits a mirror, but it’s all good. If your light is polarized, you’ll want to make sure that’s vertical, lest you be near Brewster’s [...]

This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a [...]

My, what bright, glowing optical fibers you have.
One of my online compatriots recently explained a quick and easy way to do some IR photography. I felt compelled to try, and it was pretty easy. Cheap webcams are the most direct way to do this for a few reasons:
— they’re cheap. [...]

Quick link to Cocktail Party Physics: demon spawn
Maxwell’s demon, with a bit of a modern twist that makes it apply to laser cooling.

Photochrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of chemistry
Makes you think all the world’s a funky lab, oh yeah!
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Zap the molecule with UV and it turns green. This is due (as I understand it) to the molecule changing to [...]

No, not of an alien at the window.
Here’s a little movie showing atoms being trapped and mistreated. What you’re seeing is a video of the monitor that’s hooked up to a little IR camera on the vacuum chamber. The really bright spot that’s squirming around a little are the atoms, or technically, the [...]

International Experiments In Relative Motion
Cute video of a Japanese demonstration to show relative motion. Get a mini-pickup to go 100 kph, and mount a ball-launcher on the back, that can shoot a ball out the back at 100 kph. Film it and confirm the Galilean transformation. They would have gotten bonus points [...]

A few weeks ago, over at Built on facts, I threw Matt a bit of a knuckleball in the comments.
[C]onsider a solid bar of the same index [as water]. You send in the pulse of light (assume a really good AR coating so there’s no reflection). What happens to the speed of the bar?
This was [...]

There’s a video out there in the ether that purports to measure time dilation in a car. I’ve already shown that this can, and does, happen, but you need to have some pretty expensive toys at your disposal to make the measurement.
For a good experiment (I’m perhaps charitably assuming this wasn’t just an out-and-out [...]

I was poking around the toobz (looking for a citation or link to something about “slow light”) and ran across this press release from last year that made me clench and then start grinding my teeth. I have no idea who vets these things, but OMFG, it’s bad. The press latches onto these [...]

Electrons and photons in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer show differences in their behavior
The output signal hit a minimum every time the two electron waves cancelled and a maximum when the waves maximally reinforced one another. But as they increased the current, the interference pattern waxed and waned in amplitude in an unexpected way, disappearing altogether at [...]

Zapperz, back from vacation, notes that Willis Lamb passed away recently. The Lamb shift, the energy splitting of the 2s and 2p states of the hydrogen atom, was a huge confirmation of quantum electrodynamics and garnered him the Nobel prize, and you can read more about that here. But that’s not the only [...]