The Bubble Chamber is a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles built with Processing. A single super-massive collision produces a discrete universe of four particle types. Particles draw their positions over time resulting in the construction of oddly familiar patterns.
Category Archives: Physics
I'd Hit That, Tiger Woods Style
No, not what you might be thinking.
Hitting a golf ball. Or, in the lab frame, a golf ball hitting a surface. At 150 mph (about 250 kph).
Ah, those sweet curvaceous normal modes.
For me the first few frames are wonky, so for completeness here’s a gif of the same footage
CSI: Livermore Labs
The Radioactive Clock In Your Teeth
How C-14 dating of tooth enamel can be used as a precise forensic tool.
Resonances
The required reading/viewing apparently did not include the Tacoma Narrows Bridge for the Russian engineers who built this
The bridge across Volga river is 1260 meters long and 32 meters wide. It was opened less than a year ago in October 2009.
Happy Belated Metrology Day
It was yesterday. Oh, well.
Rachel Maddow interviews Tom O’Brian, who is the head of NIST’s Time & Frequency division.
Kinda funny (to me) to hear O’Brian to continually use English units in his examples.
At Least it Doesn't Involve the LHC
Street Corner Science
Normally, learning your physics on the streetcorner is a dicey thing. But not in Chicago on June 6
Street Corner Science:
Ask a Nobel LaureateFind us in front of the Chicago Wrigley Building on the afternoon of Sunday, June 6 and ask the Nobel Prize winning Physicist, Dr. Leon Lederman, anything you want about science, technology, and the physical world!
The Days of Our Lives
The Mystery of Sand Flow Through an Hourglass
Physicists have long known that the flow of sand through an hourglass is entirely different from the flow of liquid. In the case of a liquid, the rate of discharge depends on the pressure at the aperture which is determined by the height of the liquid above.
But things are different in granular media. In 1895, a German engineer called Janssen discovered that the pressure at the bottom of a container of granules does not depend on the height of the grains above. He reasoned that the grains form chains and bridges that transmit their weight to the side of the container where they are supported by friction. So the pressure increases asymptotically with depth up to a threshold.
Stop the World!
Foucault’s pendulum is sent crashing to Earth
The original pendulum, which was used by French scientist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and which forms an integral part of Eco’s novel’s labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris.
The pendulum’s cable snapped last month and its sphere crashed to the marble floor of the Musee des Arts et Metiers.
In 1851, Foucault used the pendulum to perform a sensational demonstration in the Paris Pantheon, proving to Napoleon III and the Parisian elite that the Earth revolved around its axis. Such was its success that the experiment was replicated throughout Europe.
What's Love Got to Do With It?
Mathematical model explains marital breakups
Rey developed an equation based on the “second thermodynamic law for sentimental interaction,” which states a relationship will disintegrate unless “energy” (effort) is fed into it.
Hmmm. I guess emotional baggage is now relationship entropy. I don’t think has changed the age-old problem that investigating the three-body problem tends to create a lot of relationship entropy.
The mathematical model also implies that when no effort is put in the relationship can easily deteriorate.
Ah, yes. This is based on the work of Dr. Obvious, no doubt.