Physics
drorzel | May 27, 2010Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here's a look at Thursday's DAMOP program:
Thursday Morning, 8am (yes, they start having talks at 8am. It's a great trial.)
Session J1 Novel Probes of Ultracold Atom Gases
Chair: David Weiss, Pennsylvania State University Room: Imperial East
Invited Speakers: Cheng Chin, Markus Greiner, Kaden Hazzard, Tin-Lun Ho
Session J2 Coherent Control with Optical Frequency Combs
Chair: Linda Young, Argonne National Laboratory Room: Imperial Center
Invited Speakers: J. Ye, Moshe Shapiro, W. Campbell, …
rallain | May 27, 2010I don't know why they call it a tail drop. Here is a video:
The link I clicked that brought me to this video said the equivalent of "OMG!" That is not what I thought, really I am not sure what is so impressive (except that he didn't fall off the skateboard). If the original poster was impressed with the height of the fall, he clearly has not seen the 35 foot jump into 1 foot of water by Professor Splash.
Anyway, it seems like a simple video to analyze with Tracker Video Analysis. Mostly because the camera is stationary, there is little perspective problems and the motion of the object is…
drorzel | May 27, 2010I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days.
In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline Earth Quantum Fluids and Quantum Computation. Tom Killian of Rice opened with a nice talk on work his group has done on trapping and Bose condensing several isotopes of strontium; somebody near me pooh-poohed it as just a technical talk on evaporative cooling issues, but I thought Tom did a nice job…
rallain | May 26, 2010I am still thinking about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Sorry, but there is just tons of great physics here. Next question - how big of a balloon would you need to get up to 120,000 feet?
I am not going into the buoyancy details of Archimedes Principle - I think that was covered fairly thoroughly with the MythBusters floating lead balloon. However, in short, here is a force diagram for a floating balloon.
For a floating balloon, the buoyancy force must equal the weight of the whole thing. It turns out that the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the gas (or fluid) the object displaces…
rallain | May 25, 2010I was at the zoo this weekend, it was fun but hot. Somewhere near the middle, there was a sun dial.
The cool thing (well, I think sun dials are cool anyway) was that the shadow was pointing about to the "12". I looked at my watch and it said 1:05 PM. What is up with that? The answer: Daylight Saving Time.
What does noon traditionally mean? In this day of the digital watch, most people associate noon with 12:00, you know - lunch time. But before clocks, noon referred to the time of day where the Sun was at the highest point in the sky. It is not too difficult to find this time. Just…
drorzel | May 24, 2010This is the presentation I gave to the International Baccalaureate class from Schenectady High School today. I tend to re-use talk titles a lot, but this is substantially different than the last talk with this title, as the previous group had read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog first. For this group, I spent more time on applications, and took out a few details.
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
We were pressed for time, so I ended up not being able to show the video embedded in the next-to-last slide (this one), which is a shame.…
drorzel | May 24, 2010I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so choose only one.
rallain | May 24, 2010While I am still fresh on the Space Jump topic, let me take it to the extreme. Star Trek extreme.
SPOILER ALERT
But really, is this a spoiler alert if it is from the trailer of a movie that has been out forever? Of course, I talking about the latest Star Trek movie where three guys jump out of a shuttle and into the atmosphere.
So, in light of the Red Bull Stratos jump, how would this jump compare? First, my assumptions:
This Star Trek jump is on the planet Vulcan. I am going to assume this is just like Earth in terms of gravity and density of air.
The jumpers in Star Trek have on stuff…
rallain | May 24, 2010Crazy, but I was on CNN Saturday night. They contacted me at the last minute to talk about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Here is a screen shot to show that I am not making this up (or that I have awesome photoshop skillz).
Looking back, maybe I looked like an idiot. Really though, it wasn't my fault. I thought we were going to talk about physics. The first two questions threw me for a loop. Here are the two questions and my response (roughly paraphrased):
Will Felix survive the jump?
Answer: I guess so.
Is there a scientific reason for this jump?
Answer: I thought we were going to talk…
gboustead | May 22, 2010
If you’re like me, you probably pay much more attention to what you see around you than to what you hear. Maybe you even “tune out” much of the time. But actually sound is just as important as sight to our existence – maybe even more so. We hear before we see in the womb. The vibrations of sound penetrate our bodies in a way that images never do. So this fascinating program is not about dry, technical information. It’s all about waking you up to the sound world around you and to the amazing way our bodies and brains are built to perceive and process sound. You may well have no idea what…
drorzel | May 22, 2010The problem is "What should Chad do/ see in the evenings while he's at DAMOP next week?"
This is the major physics conference in my field, so my days will be pretty well booked up with talks and posters, but there's not much after 6pm other than food and socializing. If there's some not-to-be-missed Houston thing to do (a bar, restaurant, live music venue, etc.) in the evening, I'm open to suggestions.
The boundary values constraining this particular problem are: 1) I'll be staying in the Hyatt Regency downtown, and 2) I will not have a car.
I don't promise I'll be able to follow any and all…
drorzel | May 21, 2010I didn't see it live, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see Tom O'Brian of NIST talking about measurement on the Rachel Maddow show last night:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tom used to have an office not far from the lab I worked in at NIST, and has a background in laser stuff, so he's got to be a good guy for this. This was in honor of World Metrology Day, celebrating the hundred-and-mumbleth anniversary of the signing of the Convention on the Meter yesterday. Ironically, all the numbers Tom cites are given in English units.
So,…
grrlscientist | May 20, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Electricity, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, Electricity, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman visits the dentist and wonders about the amazing phenomenon of electricity.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
rallain | May 20, 2010And there's parliament. Ok - sorry, I had to make a "Tom (Swans on Tea)" title for this one. Tom, forgive me.
Here are two great circular motion videos. First, this one is from Dale Basler. He made himself a fine little floater-type accelerometer. Better than just make it, he made a video of the accelerometer in his car going around a round about. Check it out.
Bobber Meets Roundabout from Dale Basler on Vimeo.
So, if he is driving at a constant 10 mph, how big is the round about (traffic circle)?
Next video - more silly kids
First, I saw this one on ZapperZ's Physics and Physicists who…
drorzel | May 20, 2010I'm home with SteelyKid today, because Shavuot is important enough to close the JCC for two days. This will mean essentially no Internet for me, as it's difficult to type when you're lying on the floor being jumped on by a toddler.
As a filler post, let me take a cue from Making Light and offer you some analogies:
Quantum Mechaincs is to Newtonian Mechanics as:survey software
Choose only one, and be prepared to defend your choice in an essay of no more than 500 words, using examples drawn from the reading.
grrlscientist | May 19, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Explains Magnets and 'Why?' Questions, science, physics, magnet, forces, offbeat, ice, slippery, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman tries to explain to a non-scientist just how difficult it can be to answer certain questions in lay terms! A classic example of Feynman's clarity of thought, powers of explanation and intellectual honesty - his refusal to 'cheat'.
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
esiegel | May 19, 2010"I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." -Jack London
Most of you have seen a shooting star before, also known as a meteor.
They happen most frequently during (surprise) meteor showers, but occasionally (and sparsely) during other times of the year. Whenever a small bit of astronomical dust from outer space runs into the atmosphere -- even though it may be no bigger than a grain of sand -- it burns up in the…
rallain | May 19, 2010A new video from the Red Bull Stratos Jump guys came out. Here it is:
This reminds me of an unanswered question about the Stratos jump that I didn't address on my last post on this topic. Commenter Long Drop asked about how much Felix would heat up as he falls from 120,000 feet. This is a great question. The first, off the bat answer is that he won't heat up too much. Why do I say this? Well, when Joe Kittinger jumped from over 100,000 feet and didn't melt. Still, this is a great thing to calculate.
How do you calculate something like this? I will look at this in terms of energy. For…
cevans | May 19, 2010
What are stars?
Despite their ubiquity in our universe, their praises often go unsung. A friend admitted to me once that he hadn't realized -- you know, really viscerally realized -- that our sun was itself a star until he was in his twenties. From that moment forward, however, every glance at the night sky bowled him over with such an emotion of vast familiarity that he could hardly stand to look at it. And with just cause: every star, like our sun, is a wonder, a factory producing almost all the heavy elements floating around the cosmos -- including the everyday matter that makes up the…
drorzel | May 19, 2010I spent yesterday going over proposed copy edits to Anglicise How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the forthcoming UK edition, which adds "Quantum" to the title, and will have all new cover art, etc. This means that clergy in the book are now permitted to marry, all book property belonging to the Catholic Church has been seized by the Crown, and an "s" has been added to "math" every time it appears (weirdly, it doesn't seem to actually pluralize the word, leading to the jarring construction "maths is" in several places). My favorite parts of the changes:
The evil squirrel in Chapter 10 gets…