Phuck Yeah Physics
Because chemists can't top the hydrogen bomb.

Because chemists can't top the hydrogen bomb.
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The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe t is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it. Read on for an interesting interview with Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Man Who Found Quarks and Made Sense of the Universe

t is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

Read on for an interesting interview with Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Shine a Light (via peoplepixels)

How does all the light we see from everything get produced? Find out!

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Chladni Pattern

One of Chladni’s best-known achievements was inventing a technique to show the various modes of vibration on a mechanical surface. Chladni repeated the pioneering experiments of Robert Hooke of Oxford University who, on July 8, 1680, had observed the nodal patterns associated with the vibrations of glass plates. Hooke ran a bow along the edge of a plate covered with flour, and saw the nodal patterns emerge.

Chladni’s technique, first published in 1787 in his book, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (“Discoveries in the Theory of Sound”), consisted of drawing a bow over a piece of metal whose surface was lightly covered with sand. The plate was bowed until it reached resonance and the sand formed a pattern showing the nodal regions. Since the 20th century it has become more common to place a loudspeaker driven by an electronic signal generator over or under the plate to achieve a more accurate adjustable frequency.

lilbumps:

visualizing 10 dimensions

40-year-old data tackles very modern physics problem

Looking back at old data allows physicists to place new constraints on physics beyond the standard model and propose a new approach to uncovering evidence of new physics.

The Large Hadron Collider is still going through a painful commissioning process—coming online in time for the winter shutdown is probably not what researchers had in mind when they broke it the first time. So, what is a physicist to do when the shiny toys are still being polished? Sit around at the pub and gossip about old experiments, of course.

One such session has ended with Jorg Jaeckel, from Durham University, taking a new look at 40-year-old data from a classical electrostatics experiment. He found that this data provided the strongest constraints on a particular set of particles so far, thus proving that some experiments age very gracefully indeed.

Visualization of Electron-Scale Turbulence in Strongly Shaped Fusion Plasma

This model depicts the global turbulent transport of plasma using geometric data from the National Spherical Torus Experiment. Researchers say the data was difficult to render directly, but they developed a technique to efficiently store, access and transform the simulation data in graphics memory, which lets them render the irregularly shaped plasma grids.

Video: DOE SciDAC Program/Chris Ho, Chad Jones, Kwan-Liu Ma and Stephane Ethier

Why Don’t We Know When the LHC Will Restart?

We’re all waiting for the LHC to restart. Current plans call for collisions later this year, but at lower energies than originally hoped.

Why is it so hard to say for sure? Here’s a nice article in the CERN Bulletin that lays out some of the difficulties.

Due to the huge amount of inter-dependency between different areas of work in the LHC, even a small change can necessitate a complete overhaul of the schedule. For example, something as simple as cleaning a water cooling tower - required regularly by Swiss law to prevent Legionella - has a huge impact on the planning: “When you clean the water tanks it means we don’t have water-cooling for the compressors, that means we can’t run the cryogenics, so the temperature starts to go up,” explains Myers. “If a sector gets above 100 K, then the expansion effects of heating can cause problems, and we could have to replace parts.”

That may be cold comfort (get it? cold comfort!), but it’s the real world. I have no strong opinions about the job CERN is doing, except to recognize that this is the most complicated machine ever built, so patience is probably called for. The particles and interactions are going to be the same next year as they were last year. (Or if they’re not, that would be even more interesting.)

(via naturalnumber)

(via naturalnumber)

IBM Scientists Take First Close-Up Image of a Single Molecule As part of a greater effort to someday build computing elements at an atomic scale, IBM scientists in Zurich have taken the highest-resolution image ever of an individual molecule using non-contact atomic force microscopy. Performed in an ultrahigh vacuum at 5 degrees Kelvin, scientists were able to “to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time,” a feat necessary for the further development of atomic scale electronic building blocks. Larger size

IBM Scientists Take First Close-Up Image of a Single Molecule

As part of a greater effort to someday build computing elements at an atomic scale, IBM scientists in Zurich have taken the highest-resolution image ever of an individual molecule using non-contact atomic force microscopy. Performed in an ultrahigh vacuum at 5 degrees Kelvin, scientists were able to “to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time,” a feat necessary for the further development of atomic scale electronic building blocks.

Larger size

(via makingofamovie)

(via makingofamovie)