Spring is here, sa-pring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don’t you? ‘course you do
Where Does The Spring Potential Energy Come From?
I dare you to find a physics textbook that doesn’t talk about springs. They are everywhere.
A particle physics private eye takes on the great interaction caper
MINERvA was starting to lose her cool. Of all the detectors in all the world, this proton walked into her’s.
After 23 hours of interrogating this proton about what he was doing at the time of the boson exchange, he wasn’t revealing sign one The had detector picked up the proton in the vicinity of the incident. His usual accomplice, the muon, was seen fleeing north, where he was apprehended by MINOS, the adjacent detector. Even with the proton refusing to talk, the greenest rookie could spot a muon and a proton in the final state and tell you this was a case of charged-current quasi-elastic neutrino scattering.
h/t to mooey
Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates
There are technical terms for this kind of disintegration. Austal USA, Independence’s Alabama-based builder, calls it “galvanic corrosion.” Civilian scientists know it as “electrolysis.” It’s what occurs when “two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates,” Austal explained in a statement.
A reason you aren’t supposed to mix aluminum and copper wiring in your abode.
The meandering instability of a viscous thread
A viscous thread falling from a nozzle onto a surface exhibits the famous rope-coiling effect, in which the thread buckles to form loops. If the surface is replaced by a belt moving with speed U, the rotational symmetry of the buckling instability is broken and a wealth of interesting states are observed
You can do more than roll them down an inclined plane.
Soft-drink cans beat the diffraction limit
The group generated audible sound from a ring of computer speakers surrounding the acoustic ‘lens’: a seven-by-seven array of empty soft-drink cans. Because air is free to move inside and around the cans, they oscillate together like joined-up organ pipes, generating a cacophony of resonance patterns. Crucially, many of the resonances emanate from the can openings, which are much smaller than the wavelength of the sound wave, and so have a similar nature to evanescent waves.
To focus the sound, the trick is to capture these waves at any point on the array.
The best intro book for any topic
Of course I checked out physics and in addition to Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon Guide to Physics, it gave a bunch of books on various topics within physics. I have read none of these books, so I have no basis for endorsing or disputing the choices; I don’t know if “Best Intro” means they were going for pop-sci books for a general audience or intro textbooks for the student or serious amateur. The Cartoon Guide might indicate one way — I’m not sure — but the other titles are or seem more like textbooks. The closest I can come to a recommendation is noting that the QM book is by David J Griffiths, I’ve heard good things about it, and his Electrodynamics textbook is very good.
Rotating cylinder puts a new spin on slow light
In 1859 the French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau demonstrated this “photon drag” in the longitudinal direction by shining light through flowing water. More than 100 years later, in 1976, the British physicist Reginald Jones demonstrated it similarly in the transverse direction, by shining light near the edge of a spinning glass disc. But until now, it seems, no-one has ever shown that an image formed by light can be rotated. The problem is that the atoms are so quick to re-emit absorbed photons that the change in an image’s rotation is barely perceptible.
via Zapperz
Could a Tyrannosaurus Rex bite through a modern day tank?
Per Glasstone and Sesonske’s Nuclear Reactor Engineering, “Alpha phase uranium is “soft and ductile, Beta phase is hard and brittle and Gamma phase is very soft”. Therefore I don’t believe the depleted uranium would help with a T-Rex on the battlefield.
via @rands
Brian Goggin, S.F. Artist, is Hauling a Colossal Block of Ice From Greenland to Manhattan
In a bid to remind the public of the effects of global warming, Goggin has decided to travel to Greenland, extract an “enormous monolith” of 100,000 year-old rare blue basal ice, and transport it back to Manhattan.
This being art, things then get weird. Well, weirder. The method of extraction is unusual. Then there’s this.
Once it arrives in New York, the ice block will be placed in a custom-designed high-tech reliquary filled with sub-zero glycol solution to keep the ice chilled, weighing in at 4000 pounds altogether. The installation will include a circle of laser beams around the reliquary that serve no practical purpose, but are intended to convey “a sense of rarity and significant value.”
I have to note that I am often encircled by lasers, but they do not seem to convey a sense of rarity and significant value. That I’ve noticed, anyway.
Ultimately, after touring museums across the nation, Goggin will install the monolith in a permanent home, where he hopes to preserve the ice for exactly 488 years. Goggin picked this number because 488 years ago, Manhattan was discovered by Captain Giovanni da Verrazzano of the French ship La Dauphine.
I hope the refrigeration unit will be run by a renewable energy source if this is to bring awareness of global warming and not be a big carbon source.