Fuck Yeah Physics

Tiger Woods drives sales of physics book sky-high | guardian.co.uk

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:20:55 -0500

Tiger Woods drives sales of physics book sky-high | guardian.co.uk:

A series of pictures released by Florida police of Woods’s wrecked SUV includes a shot of the back seat, complete with waterbottle, towel and furled umbrella. But there among the shards of tinted glass in the footwell sits a well-thumbed copy of a paperback with the golf-appropriate title clearly visible: Get a Grip on Physics.

This incidental role in Woods’s domestic drama has been enough to create a rush to get hold of the book, with the title’s sales rank on Amazon.com jumping from 396,224 earlier in the week to a high spotted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal of 2,268.

…

Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.

freshphotons: In optics, a caustic or caustic network is the...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:47:01 -0500

freshphotons:

In optics, a caustic or caustic network is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. Caustic can also refer to the curve to which light rays are tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light. These shapes often have cusp singularities.

lunaticaution: illustrativo: Deanna Halsal

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:36:32 -0500

lunaticaution:

illustrativo:

Deanna Halsal

thedailywhat: World’s Smallest Thing of the Day: Tis the...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 10:00:33 -0500

thedailywhat:

World’s Smallest Thing of the Day: Tis the season to be silly at the National Physical Laboratory, where scientists have constructed the world’s smallest snowman by shooting a focused ion beam at nano-scale tin beads used in the correction of electron microscope astigmatism.

The final product measures a ridiculous 10 µm across — 1/5th the width of a human hair.

Check out the making of here.

[via.]

f112: Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:16:55 -0500

f112:

Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For Suckers

“Astronaut Don Pettit—inventor of the Zero-G Coffee Cup—plays with free-floating, head-sized water bubbles on the International Space Station. Make sure you stick around for the third experiment, where Pettit sticks an antacid tablet into one of the bubbles. [story via BoingBoing]”

xkcd - Experiment The other two are still lost on the infinite...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:16:09 -0500

xkcd - Experiment

The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.

roomthily: silicon: A toy gyroscope demonstrates the...

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:54:10 -0500

roomthily:

silicon:

A toy gyroscope demonstrates the remarkable consequences of angular momentum.

(via infinitebutterflies)

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:05:51 -0500

(via infinitebutterflies)

Helium powered stellar blast may leave a tantalizing remnant

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:43:58 -0500

section5:

The first so-called helium nova, the possible result of a large white dwarf sucking material from a hydrogen-deficient companion star, may be a precursor to a supernova.

A stellar explosion known as a nova that was detected in 2000 formed a two-lobed shell of material ejected from the star. Shaped like a bow tie, it continues to swell at great velocity. But, curiously, the coat of ejecta flowing outward from the star lacks hydrogen, the most common gas in the universe.

Such a nova had never been observed before, says Danny Steeghs, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in England. The object, known as V445 Puppis, is known as a helium nova after the gas that dominates its makeup in the absence of hydrogen.

Helium novae are thought to arise from a binary star system in which one member is a hydrogen-depleted star, which relies mostly on helium to generate light, and one is a white dwarf, an ultradense remnant of an exhausted star. The white dwarf steadily accretes helium from its neighbor until it reaches a density and temperature sufficient to trigger a nuclear explosion. If the white dwarf grows large enough to exceed the critical so-called Chandrasekhar limit—roughly 1.4 times the mass of the sun—it will ignite in a catastrophic nuclear blast known as a type Ia supernova. But if the explosion is localized to a compressed shell of accreted helium on a somewhat smaller white dwarf, a helium nova is the result, and the dwarf survives. Such novae had been predicted to occur but had never been seen before the 2000 V445 Puppis detonation.

In the November 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, Steeghs and his colleagues, led by astronomer Patrick Woudt of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, describe the rapidly expanding shell of the helium nova V445 Puppis and what it indicates about the progenitor system. Drawing on years of ground-based observations, Steeghs and his co-authors estimate that V445 Puppis is some 27,000 light-years distant. The lobes of the shell, the authors conclude from their campaign, are moving at more than 6,000 kilometers per second, with knots at the end of each lobe zooming outward even faster.

One consideration making helium novae more than just an astronomical curiosity is the suggestion that they might serve to explain anomalously young binary star systems that yield type Ia supernovae. That class of explosions is hotly studied, because as so-called standard candles, type Ia supernovae form the basis of cosmological distance measurements, although their underlying mechanisms are not well understood.

The white dwarf in V445 Puppis has been estimated to be close to the 1.4–solar mass limit, the point at which a white dwarf is thought to explode in a type Ia supernova. So assuming the white dwarf continues to feed on its helium-rich neighbor, and that it did not eject too much mass in the nova outburst, it might one day become a type Ia. “While we can’t guarantee it, all the ingredients are there in the V445 Puppis system,” Steeghs says. “You are basically loading up a white dwarf in this binary system, and it’s receiving material at a rather large rate from this helium star.”

University of Oklahoma astrophysicist David Branch calls the observations of the nova “exquisite” but stops short of calling the binary a compelling candidate for a type Ia precursor. The rate of mass transfer in the system is unclear, so it is not known how the binary will evolve. But the new study provides “significant observational support” for the model in which a helium star, bound in an orbital pair with a white dwarf, could indeed lend the compact white dwarf enough matter to initiate an explosion.

If V445 Puppis is on the path to supernova, just how long that path will be is an open question, Steeghs acknowledges. The problem in solidly pinning down the system’s future is that astronomers have yet to take a clear look into the heart of the nova, where its stellar progenitors reside. The stars remain clouded by a haze of obscuring dust. “We need to wait for that to become visible when the shell thins,” Steeghs says. “If we knew the mass of the white dwarf and the mass of the star next to it, and its orbital period, then we could sort of forward calculate how long it would take in that configuration to explode. But at this point we don’t know that number.”

It may be a few years yet before the binary system in V445 Puppis becomes visible. Ordinary novae containing hydrogen usually open up to view in a year or two, Steeghs notes. “It’s been nine years, and we still can’t see the binary whatsoever,” he says. “Because it’s the first time we’ve seen a helium nova, there is no real benchmark. I guess we should maybe not be surprised that we don’t quite know how long it will take and what it’s doing.”

roomthily: Hydrogen Atom Scale Model so the electron is one...

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:41:24 -0500

roomthily:

Hydrogen Atom Scale Model

so the electron is one pixel, the proton is 1000 pixels in diameter and the distance between is 50 million pixels. roughly eleven miles.

vacantlots: Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934)

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:00:13 -0500

vacantlots:

Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934)

(via infinitebutterflies)

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:36:25 -0500

(via infinitebutterflies)

New theory of Quantum Gravity

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:09:37 -0500

New theory of Quantum Gravity:

cloois:

which splits time from space at high temperatures. I’m always up for a new model of reality.

roomthily: A Blast at Last at Particle Collider - NYTimes.com

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:23:58 -0500

roomthily:

A Blast at Last at Particle Collider - NYTimes.com

Large Hadron Collider | Cracked.com The Large Hadron...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:56:16 -0500

Large Hadron Collider | Cracked.com

The Large Hadron Collider, built and mantained by the multiational laboratory CERN (which somehow stands for European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a “high-energy particle accelerator” that “collides opposing particle beams” of “protons” or “lead” “nuclei” at “99%” the “speed” “of” “light”.

Ok, what. We here at Cracked are not, in fact, a team of thousands of brilliant scientists, so we requested the help of renowned physicist Remington Binary to break the LHC down in simpler terms for us to understand. According to his official definition, the Large Hadron Collider “isolates individual particles, like protons or electrons, accelerates them at almost the speed of light and smashes them together so we can observe theoretical super-tiny particles that result from the annihilation.”

…

Then we consulted our cousin’s cool friend, who told us that the Large Hadron Colliders makes huge explosions out of tiny things and has the possibility to create black holes. Fuck yes. He provied this helpful diagram so we could digest these extremely advanced particle theories more easily.

It’s basically like when you were a kid, how you put Hot Wheels cars on the track and watched them crash into each other

Except this time it shoots pure particles, costs billions of dollars, is miles long, and theoretically has the capability to end the world

Whoa, dude

ummwhat: don’t you think it’s crazy that there are small...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:30:37 -0500

ummwhat:

don’t you think it’s crazy that there are small particles that are made up of nothing but themselves? i mean if you think atoms are small they are made up of electrons and protons and neutrons and those are made up of fermions so can you imagine something made up of nothing but itself i mean that is insane.

lolitahere: macmankev: Large Hadron Collider ready to restart...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:05:11 -0500

lolitahere:

macmankev:

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture

View of the CMS Detector before closure on August 17th, 2008.

lolitahere: macmankev: Large Hadron Collider ready to restart...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:04:09 -0500

lolitahere:

macmankev:

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture

A tunnel with part of one of the beam dumps of the LHC at point 6. Beam dumps are absorption mechanisms where the powerful beams can be extracted completely from the LHC, consisting of a 7m segmented carbon cylinder, 700mm in diameter, contained in a water-cooled steel cylinder, surrounded by about 750 tons of concrete and iron shielding. The sign at top warns of the presence of helium, argon and/or nitrogen in nearby pipes - gases that (if they leaked out) could displace oxygen and cause unconsciousness.

invaderxan: Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:29:51 -0500

invaderxan:

Large Hadron Collider ready to restart - The Big Picture

The silicon strip tracker of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) nears completion. Shown here are three concentric cylinders, each comprised of many silicon strip detetectors (the bronze-coloured rectangular devices, similar to the CCDs used in digital cameras). These surround the region where the protons collide.

(via macmankev)

Nucleation

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:02:21 -0500

cloois:

Phase transformation generally begins with nucleation, in which a small aggregate of atoms organizes into a different structural symmetry. The thermodynamic driving forces and kinetic rates have been predicted by classical nucleation theory, but observation of nanometer-scale nuclei has not been possible, except on exposed surfaces. We used a statistical technique called fluctuation transmission electron microscopy to detect nuclei embedded in a glassy solid, and we used a laser pump-probe technique to determine the role of these nuclei in crystallization.

All materials search for the lowest accessible energy state. As temperature is increased in disordered materials, atoms diffuse and explore different chemical and structural configurations. Crystalline phases may be favored, but a very small crystal is unstable, so there is a “nucleation barrier” to overcome; only after reaching a critical size can the nucleus grow. Although we understand the thermodynamics of the nucleation process, observation of the actual atomic-scale complexity during nucleation has remained elusive, despite its importance to the properties of materials.

[…]

Scattering techniques with diffracting radiation such as x-rays, neutrons, and electrons tell us most of what we know about the atomic configurations in solids. Yet averaging techniques are not well suited for detecting nucleation that begins with vanishing volume fraction. Today, fast electrons are unique in their subsurface sensitivity and spatial resolution, permitting diffraction from highly localized nanoscale volumes, and thus could detect nucleation. (science)