If you follow physics at all you probably already know about the Nobel. In case you’ve been living in a cave, here you go —
Professors Englert and Higgs have every reason to be very proud, but this prize is really a testament to human intellectual curiosity and perseverance. And well deserved, at that.
The 9 kinds of physics seminar
I know this is humor, but I have to say that I’ve attended talks by Nobel prize-winners that were quite good. It probably helped that they were atomic physics prize-winners, though.
Intricate Gizmos That Do Nothing but Hold Themselves Up
In 2004, Grayber began a several-year inquiry into mechanisms that clung to walls in one way or another–contraptions that used springs and weights and counterweights to claw their way into gallery drywall. In 2008, he built a spring-loaded gizmo that wedged itself inside a glass vitrine. That one felt right, and he’s been doing variations on the theme ever since.
(I’m picturing a dalek-like voice saying this, instead of ex-term-in-ate!)
Mechanical shock also tends to lessen the magnetization of a ferromagnet, and you can also scramble it with a strong oscillating external field. That will at least wound it, if not not kill it.
This is pretty cool.
J002E3 is a object that was discovered in Earth orbit in 2002. It was initially thought to be an asteroid, but turns out that it was probably the S-IVB third stage of Apollo 12.
It was off in a heliocentric orbit for 31 years, made a brief 6-orbit visit home, and now it’s off galavanting around the sun again. May get captured temporarily again in 2040
It looks like “chasing the moon” on the last orbit is what gets it kicked out of earth orbit.
Vertiasium and Minute Physics team up to explain magnets.
I was worried for a minute they were going to leave it at “magnets behave that way because electrons behave like tiny magnets” which only moves the goalposts, but there’s a nice reality check there, and it’s good even though they don’t delve too much into the quantum — they gloss over that it’s related to spin, and also lean a little on the Bohr description of the orbital motion. (IOW, it’s not that the orbital motion cancels, per se, it’s that there are no classical trajectories to begin with.
I saw this at It’s Okay to be Smart, and in a followup I think that Joe is right when he claims that when Feynman says (in the last video in the link) he can’t explain magnets, he’s not actually saying he can’t explain what the videos covered — he actually does (briefly) mention the answer. He’s explaining why “why” questions are difficult in physics — we always hit that point (mentioned in the video above) where you have to say “No-one knows. That’s just the way the universe works”.
What It’s Like To Spend 55 Days in Space
Moreover, it’s not clear that private space initiatives are the answer to the problem. “Space exploration is not an immediate payback, fiscally or otherwise,” Ivins says. “It is a generational kind of investment. And the only group that can afford to make that kind of an investment is a government.”
This is not exclusive to NASA, it’s true of research in general.
Plus, for the benefit of geeks across the universe, Ivins explains why the Borg cube from Star Trek can maneuver just as well as any starfighter that Hollywood has ever dreamed up. “In space, they’re one and the same,” says Ivins.
This is probably the one bit of science that space-based science fiction gets pretty consistently wrong — that maneuvering a craft in space would be anything like a plane or even a submarine. Most of the time the engine exhaust only points to the rear, and the engines are firing even when traveling at constant speed. Which is wrong even before you get to the fancy maneuvering.
1842: Jean-Daniel Colladon guides light with water
The great thing about [total internal reflection] is that it can be done with other transparent, optically dense materials — such as a curved stream of water!
A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
I have no way to evaluate this. This could be overselling a new idea or they could be onto something. If there’s a geometric way of expressing scattering probabilities, great. I suppose it’s possible to view Feynman diagrams as expansion terms of some function, so if they’ve found a way to figure out the underlying function, that’s wonderful. Amplituhedron seems a tad cute, but then I’m in a sub-field where someone made up Bosenova, so atomic physics doesn’t exactly have the high moral ground here.
One thing that gives me pause is any claim that they have discovered any “true” nature of anything. Like all of physics, we are talking about models. Physics describes how nature behaves, not what it really is.
Nanotechnology students build low cost Atomic Force Microscope using LEGO
This is pretty cool, but I won’t quote anything because the site has that annoying feature that adds “read more” with a link every time you copy/paste, so go read it.
The short version is that 3D-printed parts are allowed, which makes it slightly less impressive than if it were all LEGO.