Category Archives: Physics

Welcome to the Fusion Zone

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Relativistic Baseball

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Lots of physics happens, and then …

Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch”, and would be eligible to advance to first base.

What's Next?

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Now that we’ve got the Higgs, what’s next?

Combined with our knowledge of gravitation through general relativity, and the framework of quantum field theory describing all the standard model particles and how they interact with one another, it’s no stretch to say we’re sitting pretty, and that we’ve come an incredibly long way to arrive at our present understanding, especially considering practically none of this was known a century ago.

Nothing to Do with that Little Blue Pill

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Make your own epic-scale water weenie!

One of the classic squirt mechanisms is the “water weenie,” where the water is stored under pressure in a length of elastic tubing, and the force to eject the water is provided by the restoring force of that tubing. Often the elastic tubing is a simple length of latex “surgical” tubing, or in the case of the classic Wham-O Water Wiennie, a literal rubber balloon. While people have almost certainly been squirting each other with these things since (we’re guessing about ten minutes after) the invention of the water balloon, the technology has more recently been reinvented as the “constant pressure system” used in modern high-end water guns.

Here is our take on the water weenie: How to make your own high-performance, arbitrary-capacity squirt machine, starting with basic hardware.

CERN Results Improperly Kerned; Data Invalidated

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I can’t dismiss this as a joke, because I’m aware of the vitriol that surrounds the use of Comic Sans.

CERN scientists inexplicably present Higgs boson findings in Comic Sans

For many of us, the most shocking revelation to come out of CERN’s Higgs boson announcement today was quite unrelated to the science itself. Rather, we were blown away by the fact that a team made up of some of the most undoubtedly brilliant people in the world believe that Comic Sans is an appropriate font for such a historic occasion.

The most shocking revelation? Seriously? I wonder if they all dropped their monocles in their cups of tea, simultaneously. Comic sans, the very idea! Were smelling salts required, Aunt Pittypat?

Not sure if I file this under “You can’t please everyone” or “Talk about missing the point”. (That it also goes under “Comic Sans douchebaggery” is a given). I would love it if someone had actually thought about this, and did it for the sole reason of causing typographers to have a collective fit. Not defending this as the right choice, mind you. It’s just the inevitable violation of Newton’s third law — the reaction far outweighs the action, whenever Comic Sans is involved.

Let There Be Light

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Light And ‘The Illusion Of Knowledge’

Often, the familiar hides the deepest mysteries. This is certainly the case with light, one of the take-it-for-granted physical phenomena that surrounds us in everyday life. We wake up to it, we turn it on and off, rarely thinking of what it really is. A good thing, for even the greatest physicists pause before talking about the nature of light.

Handy, but Not Deep Thoughts

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A few weeks ago Doug Natelson had a post about handy numbers to know … if you’re doing some kind of physics involving liquid nitrogen or liquid helium, or anything else in which a condensed-matter/nanoscale physicists might be involved. (I assume this is in addition to knowing basic constants)

But I do atomic physics. A few favorite things that help me out if I’m away from a calculator or reference book, with some additions from my colleagues. I probably knew more of these, once upon a time.

— The speed of light can be written as 30 GHz-cm. Thus a 30 GHz signal has a wavelength of 1 cm. 1 Ghz means 30 cm.

— 1 nanosecond is 1 foot (light travel in a vacuum)

— a 1 eV photon is 1240 nm

— Room temperature is 1/40 eV (kT)

— Planck’s constant is 0.4 amu-micron-meters/second (useful for deBroglie wavelength calculations)

— There are about $latexpi$  x 10^7 seconds in a year

 

General reference:

– \(sqrt{g} = pi \) (to about 0.3%) Handy for Pendulum problems — just cancel or combine the two values.

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together

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Ancient text gives clue to mysterious radiation spike

An eerie “red crucifix” seen in Britain’s evening sky in ad 774 may be a previously unrecognized supernova explosion — and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year’s growth rings in Japanese cedar trees. The link is suggested today in a Nature Correspondence by a US undergraduate student with a broad interdisciplinary background and a curious mind.