The University of Arts and Sciences of Oklahoma (USAO) published an article on my future-brother-in-law’s successful efforts to engage students directly physics by having them design, construct, and fire home-built catapults. I’m particularly fond of the winning design (discussed in the article), for its extremely clever use of both weight(s) […]
Physics
267 posts
[This post was inspired by a comment in an article on PhysOrg, http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-cern-faster-than-light-particle.html. Thanks to Randy Scalise for bringing it to my attention.] In 1987, a distant star exploded. Here on Earth, it was named “SN1987a” – Supernova 1987a. Here are some basic facts about SN1987a: it occurred (51.4 +/- […]
In part 1 of this series, I discussed the four laws of thermodynamics. These laws tells us that the total change in energy in a system, dU, is composed of two parts: dU = dQ – dW where dQ is the heat energy added to the system and dW is […]
High temperatures in Texas have been above 100 for over a month. When we park our car to go shopping, there is rarely any tree shade in which to place the car. As a result, the car is left in the direct glare of the sun, with windows closed (since […]
In his collection of essays, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clark famously penned three “laws of prediction.” The third of these is the most widely quoted, and simply states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [1] While in Fry’s tonight, Jodi and I happened by some […]
In the first two parts of the “Hypothesis of Big Government” series, I got my hands on federal employment and employee income data, and also on median family income data, from about 1947 to 2007. A commenter on the second part of the series noted that ” . . . […]
In the movie, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” author Audrey Niffenegger explores the relationship between a husband, who unpredictably travels through time, and his wife, who must deal with his disappearances and harrowing experiences. But what if it was the wife whose life had become unpredictable, and the husband who had […]
The past two days have been full of discussions about the B-Factories Legacy Book. This book, targeted for publication in 2012, will contain a coherent record of the work of the two B-factories: Belle and BaBar. As a member of the BaBar collaboration, I am keenly interested in seeing a […]
We are enjoying a quiet Sunday morning. This month has been extremely busy, and for at least a little while this weekend we can return to something resembling quiet. Jodi is making pumpkin waffles. “Car Talk” is on the Stevo (my MythTV box), to be followed by “Wait, Wait Don’t […]
Today I learned of the death of a former mentor of mine, Richard (Dick) Yamamoto [1]. I thought I would share some memories of Dick, memories which to this day still shape my own behavior as a physicist. What I have often found intriguing about my own life is that […]
Just about one year ago, the Large Hadron Collider had a very well-intentioned opening ceremony. It was globally advertised, and along with the opening came a number of strange controversies over how the LHC would destroy the earth. It all soon passed when the reality of a complex frontier physics […]
After some false starts trying to write this post yesterday, here we go. SLAC was treated to a visit by Secretary Chu, the U.S. Energy Secretary. Unlike previous people in his position, who showered the crowd with dumbed-down bureacro-babble and errant platitudes cobbled together from a patchwork misunderstanding of SLAC’s […]