Category Archives: Physics
It's not Magic
This is cool: a micromachined device, which has been cooled into its ground stated.
Scientists supersize quantum mechanics
A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.
This, not so much
Quantum mechanics just got REAL
The fuck? In my day, we were taught, with the help of non-graphing calculators and paper notebooks, that quantum mechanics was a lot of wand-wavey nonsense about wave/particle duality that you never had to worry about because it belonged to some magical tiny land that no one visits with their actual eyes. This…this is straight-up magic.
Ohdearohdearohdear. Quantum mechanics is not magic. It’s great that it evokes a sense of wonder when the experimental boundaries are pushed, but considering established science to be “wand-wavey nonsense” diminishes it and makes it easier to accept real nonsense.
Ponder the Parabola
In basketball, shooting angle has a big effect on the chances of scoring
It’s the elegant arched trajectory naturally formed by any projectile, from an artillery round to a tomato, moving in a gravitational field. Parabolas have been extensively studied since people started throwing stuff at each other, and they shape the outcome of many ballistic sports, such as baseball, golf, football, shot put and more. But they reach their apex in basketball, where field goals and free throws demand precision control of parabolas.
One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy
Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne tells a story about dialing Pi on the phone:
Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!
I remember the Cesium atomic clock frequency as a phone number: 919-263-1770. It should be a number in the Raleigh, NC region, but there is no listing for it. I’ve never actually called it.
A Little Bang
What happens when a balloon explodes?
At 2700 fps.
Keep Left
On the Periodic Table, that is. Fun with the alkali metals.
I’ve witnessed a pretty nice Rubidium reaction, when I was cleaning out the oven we used to make an atomic beam. The oven was little more than a pipe with a hole in it, along with a removable plug for refilling/cleaning access, and heater wire wrapped around the outside. A little squirt of water into the tube, and BOOM! Turns out there was a macroscopic bit of unoxidized Rb left inside. Good times.
Talk the Talk
It’s that point on the orbit again: Talk like a physicist day. In case you need to brush up on your vocabulary, you can refer to my original post and its follow-up.
It’s getting much harder to come up with new examples, which means in physics-talk I’m approaching a local maximum in entropy.
Einstein Day
Today was chosen as Talk Like a Physicist Day because it’s Einstein’s birthday, as well as Pi day in the US date format: 3/14 (Just wait 5 years and it will be precision Pi day: 3/14/15). So here’s some Einstein.
The New Yorker: Time Bandits
What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Bonus Einstein: at National Geographic
Sean Carroll Gets the Colbert Bump
He was on the other night, but you can travel through time (or not) and see the video: The Colbert Report and Sean’s post on the experience
