Meet the Twinkie of particle physics: the muon.
The muon is the sponge cake of elementary particles. It’s plump, basic, easy to mass-produce and disappears quickly—much like a Twinkie.
Second, despite our relatively long lifespan, we are nothing like a Twinkie, which seems to have an infinite shelf life.
Much like Wonder Bread, the Twinkie’s expiration date is “You should live so long”
What did the 1882 Transit of Venus look like?
The last [transit] before 2004 was in 1882, recent enough that photography was being used in astronomy. And it so happens that astronomers at Mt. Hamilton in California were able to take a series of 147 (!) images of the transit, 140 of which were used to make this amazing video
Today’s the day! Hoping it’s clear in the late afternoon, because we’re having a family and friends shindig at work, and we don’t want to disappoint.
Motion-activated cameras at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve provide scientists a window into the secret lives of the animals there. Some, like the hummingbirds, flit about during the day. Others come out at night. Among the cast are mountain lions, bobcats, deer, coyotes, foxes and skunks.
Don’t go there at night. All of the nocturnal animals are demonically possessed — you can see their eyes glowing!
The Physicists’ Bill of Rights
We hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with certain discrete privileges, among them a mean rest life, n degrees of freedom, and the following rights which are invariant under all linear transformations
There’s actually a few of these “rights” that I think should earn a slap to anyone exercising them, but I’m just going to assume the author was thinking of string theorists and not worry too much.
Big Data, Big Data
Wanna analyze it soonah, rather than latah
At the midpoint of the 20th century, scientists at Los Alamos confronted a new challenge: Although the equations governing nuclear explosions were relatively simple to write down, they were immensely difficult and time consuming to solve. This led to the invention and use of first mechanical and then electronic computers, and the dawning of the age of computational science, which advances understanding through simulations made by solving equations in fields ranging from biology to physics to hydrodynamics.
The arrival of big data science in the last two decades constitutes another scientific revolution.
(Clear throat, ascend high horse) Quantum does not mean small. Quantum means discrete. The opposite of quantum is continuum, not big.
Excellent Approximations and Lying to Children
[I]t’s true that Euclidian geometry is only a special case of the mroe general geometry of spacetime. But it’s an amazingly good approximation to any situation you will ever encounter. Which is why we teach it to children– because it’s vastly simpler, and the cases where it doesn’t work are very far from everyday experience.
The post on which this comment is based seems to propose doing things the hard way — why teach non-Euclidean geometry without having the foundation in Euclidean geometry. Do you really want to teach that kinetic energy is \((gamma -1)mc^2\) and, perhaps more importantly, do you want to derive how you got that, rather than going with the Newtonian approximation that’s going to hold as long as you are limited to everyday speeds?
Physics curricula aren’t perfect — I think e.g. the Bohr model can do more harm than good — but then again that’s not really an example of a model that’s approximately correct. The suggestion that we abandon teaching classical physics and instead we dive into quantum and relativistic topics (starting with lasers at Eight O’clock on day 1) means explaining the details while simultaneously trying to get across basic ideas like forces and energy. I think that’s a lot to ask a student to digest.