This month marks the 120th anniversary of a profound and influential creation, the electron theory of Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. His electron was not merely a hypothesized elementary particle; it was the linchpin of an ambitious theory of nature. Today physicists are accustomed to the notion that a complete description of nature can rise out of simple, beautiful equations, yet prior to Lorentz that was a mystic vision.
Turning Japanese
I can look at you from inside as well
If you go on a fishing trip called ‘Hit em’ Hard’ and the captain tells you that you should take your bag off and put it in the ‘dry container’, what he really means by ‘dry container’ is a place that will fill up with seawater after he accidently clogs the drainage pipe, soaking you and your friends cameras, bags, wallets and cellphones for over an hour in salty seawater.
Better yet, just never go on a fishing charter with a name like ‘Hit em’ Hard.’
Needless to say, the next step of taking the camera apart was obvious.
Back … to the Envelope!
By E.M. Purcell. Solutions for both odd- and even-numbered problems!
What Burnout?
Graduate School Burnout Quantified
For most graduate students in physics, a research focused career ranks more attractive than teaching, government work, or science outreach and writing. Most PhD physicists, however, will never attain a tenure-track position at a university. Upon entering graduate school, many students realize that the odds are against them, but they push forward regardless.
[Sigh] Another story on grad school. This idea that it isn’t until one enters graduate school that one is clued in that most PhD physicists don’t go on to become research professors is a curious one; I think that physics undergraduates are more capable at math than that.
I suspect that the reason a research career becomes less attractive as one goes through school is that one learns some of the details of what research entails. The number of hours, the bureaucracy, the amount of time the professor is doing things other than actual research — the things you only get to see close-up. This is actually mentioned in the study; they also mention that they asked the students to not consider the availability of jobs when assessing the desirability.
The Right Tool for the Job
The Double-Edged Sword
This Is How Easy It is For Thieves To Steal Everything In Your Wallet
Providence’s NBC 10 took an identity theft expert to the streets to show consumers how easy it is. He slipped an RFID card scanner (you can find them on eBay for as little as 50 bucks) into an iPad case and went to town.
The worst part is there’s virtually no way to protect yourself from scanners other than investing in a special wallet or credit card sleeves that block them. They can read straight through handbags and coat pockets.
Merchants probably love them because they speed up processing. However, the banks issuing the credit cards are still on the hook for fraud, so I have to wonder how much of a problem this really is in practice. As the report mentions, your name and the security code are not encoded.
SFW
A gallery of people getting blasted with air. Save the link, because Googling is probably not going to get you there.
Magnifying the Universe
While other sites have tried to magnify the universe, no one else has done so with real photographs and 3D renderings. To fully capture the awe of the vastly different sizes of the Pillars of Creation, Andromeda, the sun, elephants and HIV, you really need to see images, not just illustrations of these items. Stunningly enough, the Cat’s Eye Nebula is surprising similar to coated vesicles, showing that even though the nebula is more than 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger, many things are similar in our universe.
The Evidence is Pretty Thin
The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)
Most of us would look at a soap film image and marvel at the beautiful rainbow colors; others would investigate the optics underlying them. But it took an exceptional physicist, Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870-1942), to realize that these colors concealed something more: direct evidence that matter consists of discrete atoms and molecules!
Today we take for granted that all material objects in the universe are comprised of discrete “bits” of matter, which we call atoms; however, even up until the early 20th century there were still proponents of the continuum hypothesis, in which all matter is assumed to be infinitely divisible.
What Goes Up, Must Come Down