Swans on Tea

Giving your new results away too soon
[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is [...]

Using NMR to check the fitness of wines (Don’t bother with this, for multiple reasons, if they have a bottlecap instead of a cork)
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Makes Sure Wine is Fit For the Queen of England
When wine hits 1.4 grams of acetic acid per liter it is considered bad. Although the average bottle of [...]

Cryptophysicists
One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, [...]

Bee explains The Equivalence Principle
That is what Einstein explains in his thought experiment with the elevator. If you are standing in the elevator (that is just a local patch, theoretically infinitesimally small) you can’t tell whether you are pulled down because there is a planet underneath your feet, or because there is a flying pig [...]

August 18, 1868. Jules Janssen “invents” helium. (At least, according to principal Skinner. “Curse the man who invented helium! Curse Pierre Jules César Janssen!)
Janssen was observing an eclipse and measured an emission line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm, which didn’t correspond to any known element. Norman Lockyer also observed the [...]

TS2 on Target – view from the LOQ cabin
A brief overview of some neutron history
Since it carries no charge, one could not “weigh” a neutron directly in a mass spectrometer, but had to estimate its mass from the difference between deuterium and hydrogen. However in 1935, more accurate measurements allowed Chadwick to derive a neutron [...]

Jennifer’s enumeration of the PARTICLE BILL OF RIGHTS reminds me of a neat effect. I hope the second amendment
The right of unstable Particles to decay shall not be infringed.
only applies to militias fundamental particles, because people have been messing with that “right” for a while in atoms. These are demonstrated by some fascinating [...]

From our “Plan of the Week”
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August 12 & 17 1877 - Asaph Hall discovers the moons of Mars. From Halls’ notebooks: I repeated the examination in the early part of the night of [August] 11th, and again found nothing, but trying again some hours later I found a faint object on the following [...]

A pretty cool experiment that puts a lower bound on a speed of entanglement has been performed. The experimenters entangled photons, separated them, and then made their measurements.
Physicist Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland split off pairs of quantum-entangled photons and sent them from the university’s campus [...]

Matt’s discusses the disaster of grades in The Final Countdown
I just finished grading three problems worth of the final exam (the other two TAs are taking care of the rest), and I think the exam can be safely described as a debacle. It was a disaster. The scores haven’t been tallied up yet, but I [...]

Another cool find by Zapperz: Threading Light Through the Opaque
Freshly fallen snow is blinding white because the jumble of flakes scatter light in all directions. Such scattering also implies that little light passes through snow, so that if you’re ever buried deep in it, you’ll find yourself in the dark. But according to theoretical [...]

Zapperz has a short post on an article that appeared in the NY Times, chumming the waters of fear about radiation from granite countertops. I see that Chad has promised and delivered a bit of a rant, pointing out that popular media could and should do science. The problem is that they don’t [...]