Brian Cox on The Colbert report
You’re saying sensible things. This has gone horribly wrong!
Category Archives: Physics
They Need to Fire the Maid
High-energy physicists have finally pinpointed their dust problem. Inside multi-million dollar storage rings, high-speed trains of electrons are often derailed by micron-sized specks of dust. Now a team has shown that dust grains arise from sparks inside a Japanese storage ring, as they report in an upcoming paper in Physical Review Special Topics–Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB), a free, online journal. The team also serendipitously caught on video one of the tiny grains being swept along in the electron beam–the particle physics equivalent of a criminal caught by a security camera. The feat opens the possibility for further characterization of the dust.
Never Slime a Guy with a Positron Collider Strapped to his Back
Now Showing on a Computer Near You
David Saltzberg, the science consultant for the TV show The Big Bang Theory, has a blog explaining the science: The Big Blog Theory
Its blogroll needs some character development, methinks.
Feeling Crabby
Rug Physics
The Physics Of A Bump In A Rug
The way a bump in a rug travels across a floor has been compared with the way tectonic plates move, cell membranes slide and inchworms crawl. Friction makes it difficult to drag a big piece of carpet, but when there’s a wrinkle in the material, the wrinkle can easily roll down the length of the carpet, moving the carpet along in the process.
Warhead Not Included
Beauty is in the Vision-Response of the Beholder
Skulls in the Stars: Lord Rayleigh on Darwin
Darwin set out to show that insects play a crucial role in cross-pollinating plants, carrying pollen from one flower to another, and he published his results on orchids in a book in 1862, Fertilisation of Orchids. Among those results is the insightful observation that the colors and scents of flowers had evolved to attract insects and optimize the cross-pollination process.
This observation is what Rayleigh seems to be commenting on, and mildly criticizing. Rayleigh suggests that Darwin’s argument leads to the conclusion that insects must have vision similar to human vision — otherwise, why would a flower which is pretty to us be pretty to an insect? Rayleigh argues that this is a rather large assumption to make based on the limited evidence available in that era.
It’s well-known now that many insects are sensitive to UV, and plants look quite different to us in that spectrum. I have no idea what they look like to the bugs.
Everything Looks Worse in Black and White
Cocktail Party Physics: images from supernovae to supermodels
Light can be modeled as photons, which are characterized by a wavelength λ and a frequency f. Those quantities are connected by the speed at which the wave travels (which, for electromagnetic waves, is the speed of light). c = f λ, which means that the wavelength decreases as the frequency increases.
Even though humans can see only a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we are somewhat obsessed about transforming what we see into a format that allows us to share it with other people, or putting it in giant piles in the back of a closet that we really do intend to organize someday. Really.
Was the Moon Adopted?
Controversial Moon Origin Theory Rewrites History
If a new twist on a decades-old theory is right, conditions in the early solar system suggest the moon formed inside Mercury’s orbit and migrated out until it was roped into orbit around Earth.
The idea flies in the face of scientific consensus, known as the giant impact hypothesis, which holds that the moon formed from red-hot debris left over after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.
It’s too generous to call this a theory, as they do in the article. From the scant information, it sounds more like a plausibility argument; physics does not preclude the scenario, so it could have happened. But the next step is looking to see if this could be falsified by what we know or could investigate. It’s not clear to what extent this has already taken place.