Heisenberg Principle : Tuesday Tattoo
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (by Gianna, Powerhouse Tattoos, Montclair, Nj)
Math Tattoo: 6×9=42 - I am sure there is a deep meaning to this
Is it because answer to every question is 42?
The number 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
May be stylized 6 and 9 are not numbers at all but represent something else. 6×9 =42 in some different base numbers.
OK, I got it; from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe book:
Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence “WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE?”
“ “Six by nine. Forty two.”
“That’s it. That’s all there is.”
“I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe
Sometimes I do think that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Universe.
Science books fetch astronomical prices: Copernicus book $2.2M
I wrote about the Science book auction a few days ago.
Here is how much was realized for some of the notable books.
GALILEI, Galileo (1564-1642). Le operazioni del compasso geometrico, et militare. Padova: in the house of the author by Pietro Marinelli, 1606.
Price realized : $506,500
KEPLER, Johannes. Harmonices mundi libri V. Linz: Johann Planck for Gottfried Tampach, 1619.
Price realized : $306,000
COPERNICUS, Nicolaus (1473-1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, libri V. Nuremberg: Johann Petreius, 1543.
Price realized : $2,210,500
In all, the total take from Tuesday’s auction at Christie’s New York came to more than $11 million — compared with a pre-sale estimate of $6 million.
Amazing closeup pictures of bubbles - like you have never seen before
Creative Review commissioned photographer Jason Tozer to shoot these pictures on behalf of Sony using its new Alpha digital camera. All common-or-garden soap bubbles, shot in-camera!
And my favorite:
Click for a better view.
To learn how the pictures were taken, please visit here ; but essentially they blew up soap bubbles and took pictures with Sony’s new alpha Series SLR camera.
The iridescent colors of soap bubbles are caused by interfering light waves and are determined by the thickness of the film. They are not the same as rainbow colors but are the same as the colors in an oil slick on a wet road.
As light impinges on the film, some of it is reflected off the outer surface while some of it enters the film and reemerges after being reflected back and forth between the two surfaces. The total reflection observed is determined by the interference of all these reflections. Since each traversal of the film incurs a phase shift proportional to the thickness of the film and inversely proportional to the wavelength, the result of the interference depends on these two quantities.
Thus, at a given thickness, interference is constructive for some wavelengths and destructive for others, so that white light impinging on the film is reflected with a hue that changes with thickness.
Gems from Physics History : Science book auction at Christie’s.
The remarkable collection of a retired physician and amateur astronomer, Richard Green of Long Island, which is offered for sale by Christie’s, contains some of the greatest physics books ever written.
Dr. Green’s library includes works by Galileo, Copernicus, Newton,Gauss, Kepler, and Einstein.
One lot includes 130 reprints from Albert Einstein’s collection of his scientific papers, including his first one on relativity.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica explained the universal laws of gravitation and motion for the first time.
Nicolaus Copernicus’s book “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (”On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”). In it, the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.
Estimate for the Copernicus book: about $1M.
BERNOULLI, Jacob (1654-1703). Ars conjectandi, opus posthumum. Accedit tractatus de seriebus infinitis, et epistola gallicè scripta de ludo pilae reticularis. Edited by Nicolaus I. Bernoulli (1687-1759). Basel: Thurneisen Brothers, 1713.
CURIE, Marie Sklodowksa (1867-1934). Recherches sur les substance radioactives. Thèse présentée a la Faculté des Sciences de Paris. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1904. (no image)
DOPPLER, Johann Christian (1803-1853). “Ueber das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne und einiger anderer Gestirne des Himmels”. Offprint from: Abhandlungen der k. böhm. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 5th series, vol. 2 (1842). Prague: Borrosch & Andrä, 1842.
FOUCAULT, Léon (1819-1868). “Démonstration physique du movement de rotation de la terre au moyen du pendule.” In: Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences. Volume 32, Number 5. Paris: Bachelier, 3 February 1851. (no image)
FRANKLIN, Benjamin. Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America … to which are added, Letters and Papers on Philosophical Subjects. London: for David Henry and sold by Francis Newbery, 1769
GALILEI, Galileo. Sidereus nuncius magna, longeque admirabilia spectacula pandens. Venice: Tommaso Baglioni, 1610.
GAUSS, Carl Friedrich (1777-1855). Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes and I.H. Besser, 1809.
KEPLER, Johannes. Astronomia nova \KAITIOLOGHTOS\k, seu physica coelestis, tradita commentariis de motibus stellae martis, ex observationibus G. V. Tychonis Brahe. [Heidelberg: E. Vögelin,] 1609.
MAXWELL, James Clerk. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873.
WRIGHT, Wilbur (1867-1912). Some Aeronautical Experiments. Offprint from: Journal of the Western Society of Engineers 6 (December, 1901). [Chicago, 1901].
The auction catalog is like taking a walk through the development of scientific thought; not just in physics but in other fields as well.
Soon The entire US Congress would consist of physicists!
NY Times has an interesting article about the inordinate number of physicists in the Congress.
WASHINGTON — According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress, and that is counting the psychologist, the psychiatrist, a dozen other M.D.’s, three nurses, an engineer, two veterinarians, a pharmacist and an optometrist.
But physics is on a roll.
“Go back 15 years, and there weren’t any physicists,” said Vernon J. Ehlers, a Republican who taught the subject at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he was elected to Congress in 1993.
His was a lone voice until 1998, when Rush Holt, assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, won election from New Jersey as a Democrat. And today there are three, adding Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab and another Democrat, who won a special election in March in Illinois.
“If we continue to reproduce in this manner,” Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, “the entire Congress would consist of physicists!”
And the reason why there are so many physicists in the congress:
“Physicists are versatile,” Mr. Ehlers said. “We live in the real world.”
And Vernon J. Ehlers also quipped:
“We’ve done the calculation,” Mr. Holt said. “By midcentury, I think, we’ll have a functioning majority.”
I bet it was a back of the envelope calculation, correct within an order of magnitude. So the physicists majority will happen sometime between 2050 and 2550…
great! I can’t wait. I wonder when will we have our first Physicist President?
The Anime Laws of Physics
Here are select Anime Laws of Physics:
#3 - Law of Sonic Amplification, First Law of Anime Acoustics
In space, loud sounds, like explosions, are even louder because there is no air to get in the way.
#11 - Law of Inherent Combustibility
Everything explodes. Everything.
#12 - Law of Phlogistatic Emission
Nearly all things emit light from fatal wounds.
#15 - Law of Inexhaustibility
No one *EVER* runs out of ammunition. That is of course unless they are cornered, out-numbered, out-classed, and unconscious.
#26 - Law of Feline Mutation
Any half-cat/half-human mutation will invariably:
1) be female
2) will possess ears and sometimes a tail as a genetic mutation
3) wear as little clothing as possible, if any
Copyright by Ryan Shellito and Darrin Bright.
More can be seen here.
All of these laws are shown in action in this clip:
Matter of Everything - Teaser and Trailer
Matter of Everything.. Hmmm,
A documentary about “no ordinary matter”..
What could it be?
Yup, it’s a documentary about Dark Matter.
THE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT NO ORDINARY MATTER
The Matter Of Everything is a feature documentary that challenges us to see beyond our everyday sense of experience into the unseen universe. From the quantum to the cosmos, The Matter Of Everything journeys deep out of the foundations of nature to reveal what we are, at billionths of the human scale. At that level, physicists at Fermilab, one of the largest particle research facilities in the world, describe a universe that is more unified than ever imagined.
Click Here to visit their site.
Relationship between math and physics
XKCD had a comment about the purity of the subject matter:
A similar joke I have heard before:
Sociologists want to be psychologists, because if you understand the brain you can understand society.
Psychologists want to be biologists, because if you understand life you can understand the brain.
Biologists want to be chemists, because if you understand matter you understand life.
Chemists want to be physicists, because if you understand the universe you understand matter.
Physicists want to be God.
God wants to be a mathematician.
Comment by Wingy.
10 Light years to the Inch
The Star Map Crystal is a cosmic paperweight: a 3″ glass cube laser etched with a 3D map of all stars within 5 parsecs of the sun.
Art, Science and Technology
Bathsheba Grossman is an internationally collected artist, working with new and old technology to make sculptures in many materials.
To draw this map, pulses from a focused laser beam are directed into the blank glass. Each pulse of the beam passes freely through the glass except at its focal point, where the concentrated energy causes a tiny fracture. These microscopic sparkles catch the light, forming a permanent map floating inside the crystal.
Lorenz attractor
A trajectory of Lorenz’s equations, rendered as a metal wire to show direction and 3D structure.
3D Mandelbrot fractal animation - Julia set
Here is a 2D julia set
And the 3-D Julia set animation.
Every time I see it, I feel perplexed as to the complexity and the beauty of it.
Tuesday Tattoo: Topological tattoo - Immersion of a torus in 3 space
Here is a torus in 3 space by Cassidy Curtis
And here is the corresponding tattoo
There is nothing more fascinating then multidimenstional topology. A complex structure viewed the right way becomes so simple.
Random act of science teaching - you weigh less on the way down in the an elevator
Random act of science teaching. These scales were mounted inside commercial and residential elevators allowing riders to test this fact.
Explanation was available as a leaflet in the the elevator.
Everyday physics, tested by everyday person, using everyday objects.
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