aimless in wonder
But for now we are young, let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see
A 2001 earthquake in Olympia, WA caused a sand pendulum to draw this floral design as a result of the high- and low-frequency waves that shook the shop it resided in. Beautiful result of a destructive moment.
(via Futility Closet)
(via freshphotons)
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”
author Aaron Freeman on the NPR program All Things Considered.
“There’s no way to take a direct picture of something as small and fleeting as a Higgs boson. But physicists can photograph its relatives, directly imaging atomic structures and improving our understanding of atomic physics. Now comes this picture: The first-ever snapshot of a single atom’s shadow.
This is the smallest thing that can be seen in visible light. A team led by Dave Kielpinski at Griffith University in Australia figured out how to grasp a single ytterbium ion in an electric field, holding it in place so it could be photographed. They shone light on it in a specific frequency, and used an ultra-high-resolution microscope to focus on it. The atom cast a shadow on a CCD detector, which captured the image you see here.
The team wanted to prove how many atoms it takes to cast a shadow, and it turns out it was just one. This has some practical applications, too, like determining what types of light would be needed to watch certain biological processes without damaging them.”
(via For the First Time, A Snapshot of A Single Atom’s Shadow | Popular Science)
A dark matter particle smacks into an average person’s body about once a minute, and careens off oxygen and hydrogen nuclei in your cells, according to theoretical physicists. Dark matter is streaming through you as you read this, most of it unimpeded. Dark matter is arguably the greatest mystery in modern physics. Observations from multiple sources across a few decades now shows that most of the universe is made of matter we can’t see — hence the name — but no one has been able to find it. One strong candidate for this dark material is called a WIMP, for weakly interacting massive particle, and there are a variety of observatories in Europe and the U.S. that are looking for these things. Some have found promising hints, but others have seen a whole lot of nothing.
Of the billions of high-energy WIMPs passing through a body every second, fewer than 10 hit a body’s nuclei in a given year. But lower energy WIMPs make impact much more frequently, around 100,000 collisions per person per year. That’s about one per minute.
What does this mean? Maybe nothing, in terms of impacts on human health — cosmic and solar radiation also rains down on us all the time, and it has many more detrimental effects. But it’s interesting to think that we ourselves could be dark matter detectors.
Dark Matter Collides With Human Tissue An Average of Once a Minute, Study Finds | Popular Science (via myserendipities)
interesting in a poetic way as well…
(via myserendipities)
Crayons under the spectrophotometer
or
“Physics determines the difference between yellow-green and green-yellow”
Photographer Mark Meyer has been nagged by the mystery of the crayon box since he was a child. What really made some of these colors so different? Were they just being lazy when picking out names? So he put the crayons in a spectrophotometer, and measured their spectral power distributions, which is their unique combinations of reflected light organized by wavelength.
As expected, white reflects almost all equally, and black is the opposite. But Crayola must have a funny naming convention, because colors like “red-violet” are pushed more toward violet than “violet-red” is. Same for “yellow-green” and “green-yellow”.
I’ve never thought about crayons for this long in my life. Not since I watched Mr. Rogers tour us through the Crayola factory, which basically changed my life.
Cooool
A photograph from 1952 that shows the first millisecond of a nuclear explosion.
Woah.
It’s true. Taken with a rapatronic camera in 1952.
(via jtotheizzoe)
Blue Light Turns an Octopus An Invisible Red
When you’re a small, ocean-dwelling creature, your primary concern each second of your day is to not get eaten. It must be a terrifying existence.
Land-lubbers have long-used camouflage as a way to avoid predators, but how would that work under the sea? Light doesn’t really penetrate below 1,000 meters, so if you live that deep your best bet might to be invisible. But how would you do that? Being clear is an option, but you’d still have a shadow, and nothing is completely clear.
But what if, like the octopus above, you live in the middle-depths, where only some colors of light can penetrate? You’d have to develop a different trick.
Blue light has a shorter wavelength and penetrates deeper than red light in water (that’s also why the ocean looks blue!). These creatures use that blue light to go invisible in the middle-depths.
By turning on red pigment cells on command, they are able to turn black when that blue light hits them. This is because a solely blue light source will not be reflected by red pigments (review how color works if you’re confused), making the octopi look black and invisible.
Cool trick.
(via ScienceNOW)
(via jtotheizzoe)
Verlander’s Pitching Physics: How Does The Body Do It?
After lifting his front leg up before the throw, the pitcher’s leading foot makes contact with the ground. At that point, his throwing forearm, which is cocked behind him, should be between horizontal and vertical. If the arm is too high or too low, either the pitch will be too slow or the pitcher will put too much force on his elbow and shoulder, ultimately leading to injury.
Next comes a subtle twisting of the body, when a right-handed pitcher like Verlander shifts from facing third base to facing home plate. Like other elite pitchers, Verlander’s pelvis turns first, followed by his trunk (see video here). That way, all of the muscles in his upper body distribute energy into the throw. Amateur players often draw energy from just their arms and legs.
As he lunges forward, the pitcher’s front knee needs to be bent deep enough to stabilize his weight and maximize the amount of energy that passes from his leg muscles through his trunk.
Of course, the movement of the arm matters — particularly the angle that a pitcher drops his hand behind his body before whipping it forward. Like a sling shot, the farther the arm can reach back, the faster a pitcher can throw the ball. Bigger arms help, but Newton’s Laws of Motion suggest a tradeoff. An arm with more mass is slightly harder to accelerate to the same speed as a smaller arm.
… Verlander releases the ball at a height of about 6.5 feet, said Alan Nathan, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. After that, physics takes over yet again with a few basic forces of motion. Gravity pulls the ball down, sometimes by as much as three feet. And air resistance slows it down by as much as 10 miles per hour.(via Discovery News)
(via jtotheizzoe)
We’re such a hit at parties.
Truly amazing, well done:
Fifteen uncoupled simple pendulums of monotonically increasing lengths dance together to produce visual traveling waves, standing waves, beating, and (seemingly) random motion.
Credit&Source: Simple Harmonic (and non-harmonic) Motion, Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations
physics is so cool!!!
If you’re a long-time reader, you may remember the great leftover Easter Peeps microwave experiment. Well, today we’re going to be nuking leftover Valentine’s Day chocolate to demonstrate one of the constants of physics, the speed of light. Chocolate makes a very appropriate medium, because the heating property of microwaves was first discovered by a scientist whose candy bar melted in his pocket when he got too close to a microwave device being tested for use in radar.
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
- Stephen Hawking quoted in Der Spiegel
“You know how when you work out there’s that good pain? Not the “I think I just tore a ligament” pain but the “I am aware of my muscles’ existence” pain? Stephen Hawking makes our brains hurt in that good way. He makes all the little neurons stretch for concepts that are just out of reach. He tries to put them within our grasp, too. But sometimes it just doesn’t work, and he has to make a “briefer” version to ensure the whole class can keep up. Because he can do that.” (teenormous.com)