Oh, oh, Domino
Category Archives: Physics
TILT!
Atomic flippers seek tiny ball for pinball fun
Two “flippers” made from pairs of platinum atoms are made to move back and forth by firing electrons at them. All that is missing is the ball, says Harold Zandvliet at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Despite the light-hearted description of work, the team says its device is an important advance in atomic-scale engineering.
“This pinball machine elegantly shows that even on the scale of a few atoms, a device can be constructed that only operates if an external signal is applied,” Zandvliet told New Scientist.
Somewhere, Under the Rainbow
Pictured: Rare upside-down rainbow spotted in the UK
Rainbows are formed when sunlight is refracted in a raindrop.
But in a circumzenithal arc, the colours are in reverse order from a rainbow, with violet on the top and red at the bottom.
The arc usually vanishes quickly because the cirrus clouds containing the ice crystals shift their position.
Ice particles in high cirrus clouds occur all year round, but circumzenithal arcs are usually obscured by lower level clouds.
Circumzenithal arcs are so named as they go around the zenith – the point in the sky directly above the observer- rather than the sun.
(Pedantic man notes that rainbows actually refract the light twice)
More on circumzenithal arcs
h/t to Caroline
On the Topic of Unstable Equilibrium
Most of what follows falls (as it were) under the heading of “what happens when you fail to keep the center of mass above the supports.” The “ooh, that’s gonna leave a mark” cringe-o-meter registers noticeably in some scenes.
(The male gymnast’s vault at about 2:30 looks faked. Is that just me?)
Cut the Red Wire
I was wiring up some stuff in the lab, and wondered what color-coding we had used for that component on the prototype.
“It’s red” was the almost immediate reply.
Duh. I had expunged this from the buffer. They’re almost all red. That’s why we went with color coding — so much easier than labels.
Faulty Transformer was a Ruse — the Real LHC Update
Large Hadron Collider spitting out lost socks
“It started on Tuesday, when a single white gym sock was found inside the collider,” said Dr Thomas Engelson. “At first, we thought it was a prank or something left behind by one of the construction workers. We removed it, and, following our next high-energy collision, the accelerator was found to have filled with more than one hundred thousand socks. They had popped out of all the tiny black holes the collider produces.”
Immediately following their appearance, the socks were warm to the touch. Engelson said that it was probably the result of the energy dispelled at being burped from the black holes, but scientists are investigating the possibility that they have come straight from people’s tumble dryers.
“They were also full of static,” said Engelson. “It is absolutely conceivable that the socks have been transported directly from tumble dryers, via some undiscovered, invisible vortex created by the heat, static and repetitive circular motion of a tumble dryer.” The only thing confusing this theory is that the fibres on some analysed socks date back to the early 1900’s, a few years after the clothes dryer was invented.
Sesame Street Physics
I can just picture Big Bird:
Can you say, “cooperate?”
Can you say, “surface plasmon polariton?”
When light hits a metal, it can create a surface plasmon polariton–often called simply a “surface plasmon”–which is a traveling wave combining electromagnetic fields with electron oscillations. Researchers are using tiny plasmon antennas to funnel more light into solar cells (photovoltaics), increasing their efficiency. Others studying “plasmonics” hope to develop devices that replace some electric currents with plasmon waves, because plasmons can theoretically carry as much information as light pulses but squeeze it into the nanometer-sized wires used in standard computer chips.
Lucky Me!
I’ve been adopted. That’s right, the adopt-a-physicist program has two three groups that want to get to know me (professionally).
The email I got from the program coordinator says there are a few slots open, in case any physicists out there wish to participate. It’s included (nominally spam-proofed) below.
I was just reading through your profiles and it reminded me how much I love this program! There are a wide variety of careers and backgrounds represented, and there are over 100 classes that are eager to participate.
*Classes are “adopting” their physicists as we speak, and can do so until Sept. 25
*You can see the classes that have adopted you when you login in to www.adoptaphysicist.org and view your profile
*Physicists with pictures on their profile are generally first to go, so if you haven’t added one it’s worth thinking aboutWe still have room for some additional physicists–so if you know anyone that is interested, please have them email me at krand(at)aip.org and I’ll get them set up.
Forums will open on Sept. 29th!
I hadn’t included a picture, and was in fact entering some of my biographical information when the second group adopted me. I think now I won’t add a photo, lest I scare anyone away before selections are done. Then it will be too late, mwuhahahahaha! I’ll get to “converse” with them in a forum setting, and will of course point them here for some of my “lab stories” posts.
More Pegging the Geekmeter
Are You Savvy?
After figuring out that Dot Physics used to live next door to the “new” blog, I spent lunchtime looking through the old posts. And I found a link to a physics quiz at Intuitor.
At Intuitor we have decided to fight back against the dark forces of ignorance and shine the bright light of truth on the wickedness of physics misconceptions through the lens of the Intuitor Physics Savvy Quiz. We have already taken a stand against the insultingly stupid movie physics foisted upon young and unsuspecting minds by the American Babylon called Hollywood. Yet, we find that bad physics thinking has already infected the minds of millions.
We urge you to take the Physics Savvy Quiz and find out if you have been infected by the heinous virus of physics misconceptions. The quiz is painless and consists entirely of true-false questions. These can be answered without making calculations and are taken from concepts taught in introductory-level high school or middle school physical science classes. In other words, if you have never taken high school physics and can barely do algebra, you should still be able to answer the questions
(If you want to skip all the introduction and explanation, the actual quiz is here)
It’s pretty good, generally free of ambiguity, using the scientific definitions of terms and testing concepts rather than memorization of facts. One possibly vague question: “negative acceleration” is used as “acceleration in the negative direction” of some arbitrarily defined coordinate system. Have at it. (Disclosure: I scored 100%. No, really. I was karving my initials on the moose I’m a professional. But please, try this at home. I was not on a closed course.)