Occupy Stockholm
The Onion: Fans Of Victorious Nobel Laureates Riot In Stockholm
The annual announcement of Nobel Prize winners was once again marred by vandalism this year, with triumphant fans of the 2011 laureates mobbing Stockholm streets last week, breaking shop windows and setting bonfires as they celebrated remarkable achievements in economics, physics, medicine, and other disciplines.
'Tis the Season for Endorsements
Fear not, this is not about politics. It’s October, which is the time of year various physics blogs I read vie for your hard-earned money to support some worthy classroom projects through DonorsChoose. Rather than run a separate campaign against blogs that are in consortia and have wider readerships, I will merely point you toward them, and I will be donating through one of them.
The first announcement I have seen is from Dot Physics: It’s That DonorsChoose Time of the Year, and a post at Uncertain Principles has just appeared
Update: The Bad Astronomer also has a donation page
Diffraction With Infrared Light
Diffraction With Infrared Light
… and visible light, too.
Super, Man
Faster than a speeding photon? Precursors test whether light can be faster than light
While we wait [for neutrino analysis], it is worth noting that in June 0f 2011 a group of researchers performed an experiment to see if light itself could move faster than light! In particular, the scientists used a little known optical phenomenon known as an optical precursor to see if individual photons might travel faster than while propagating in a material. In the end, the experiment suggests that these single photons did not in fact violate Einstein’s speed limit, though the results still got a significant amount of press.
Park Matter
For Berkeley physicist, worldwide fame and campus parking
Inevitably, a reporter wondered when Perlmutter would get his Nobelist’s parking permit, one of the international prize’s notable campus perks. “I was assuming today,” Perlmutter replied, adding that “the only reason to win a Nobel Prize is so that you can park on campus.”
Vive la Différence
Drawing the line between science and pseudo-science.
What this means is that you could do a test that shows a scientific claim to be false, but no conceivable test could show a pseudo-scientific claim to be false. Sciences are testable, pseudo-sciences are not.
Better than Dominos
The potential energy is in the bending of the sticks, rather than gravity.
Even Harder than the Triple-Lindy
Feast your eyes on a complete quadruple rainbow
Each extra reflection inside a raindrop produces a different rainbow. Each reflection dims the ray a little bit more, such that higher order rainbows not only become progressively fainter and difficult to see, they also switch what side of the sky you see them on
Freeze Doesn't Mean Stop
Laser light used to cool object to quantum ground state
For the first time, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light. The achievement paves the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive detectors as well as for quantum experiments that scientists have long dreamed of conducting.