Talk Like A Physicist

International Women’s Day - celebrating contributions of Women to Physics

UCLA website has an interesting section called “Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics”. There are 83 women profiled and 300 more cited who have contributed significantly to Physics.

Here is one of the women physicists I admire the most; Madam Marie Curie. I especially like this oil portrait of her.

It can be viewed at Dibner Institute for the History of Science.

Here are some funny quotations from women physicists from “In her own words…”

Inge Lehman:

“You should know how many incompetent men I had to compete with - in vain!”

Emmy Noether:

“My methods are really methods of working and thinking; this is why they have crept in everywhere anonymously.”

I am embarrassed to say that I did not know that the brilliant Noether Theorem (connecting symmetries and conservation laws), which I have used umpteen number of times, was formulated by a woman.

The only way I know how to celebrate Women’s Day is to hope, pray, wish, and facilitate getting more of the women to do physics and to anticipate all the phenomenal discoveries they will make in this century.

Out of Clutter, Find simplicity : Talk Like a Physicist Day Marc 14, 2008

14th March, 2008

Talk Like a Physicist Day

How many slices of bread can you toast form a bolt of lightening?

100,000 slices of bread!

It’s an awful lot of toast, but then a typical lightning bolt isn’t short on energy. It typically contains about 5 billion joules of energy.

This means that one typical strike could power a 1000 Watt, two slice toaster for 84,000 minutes in which time you could make around 100,000 slices of toast, if you are fast.

Source

Motionless Monday - bullet through 4 color sticks of crayons.

Interesting how the color of the first crayon is dominant on the bullet.

Source