This weekend, co-vocabularists are invited to submit novel nouns of assemblage for modern phenomena. A bucket of Wiis? A swamp of blogs? A murder of crowds?
So what would you call a crowd of physicists? Here are my suggestions:
A quantum of physicists
A current of physicists
A plasma of physicists
A horizon of physicists
A resistance of Physicists
An einstien of physicists / A bohr of physicists / A hawking of physicists
An inertia of physicists
A sigma of physicists
Of course, a crowd of string theorists will be called:
A string of Physicists
A knot of Physicists
A manifold of Physicists
A dimension of physicists
I am sure you can come up with something better. Leave a note in the comment.
Path Integral Formulation of your life. I know that if I were to draw my life, it will have so many kinks, and loops and several places where there are discontinuities. And oh, yah, I also have a couple of year where I have no idea what I was doing, and a few twists and turns making it unintegrable!
Sunny is applying irresistible force to an immovable object.
Sunny is Blue shifted
Sunny believes in emergent gravity
Sunny believes that ice cream is responsible for emergent gravity
Sunny is exploring Short Range Correlations
Sunny is going through a phase transition
Sunny is tunneling through a high potential barrier
Sunny is guilty of pseudo random number sampling
Sunny was responsible for the supernova event that happened 630M years after the big bang.
Sunny is looking for the breaks to stop cosmic acceleration.
Sunny likes his coffee super heated and his milkshake super cooled
Sunny has neutrino vision, no wonder he can’t sleep at night.
Sunny is self diffused.
Sunny calculates everything from first principles.
Click on the above to see a lot more interesting details.
Not sure about you, but I think I would think better and more clearly, if I were surrounded by 50,000 volts, displayed as beautiful dancing arcs, streaming out of my hat and my shirt and my sneaker; sort of a visual representation of the various thought processes running in my head.
Who needs Twitter when you can have TeslaArctr visually showing off and thought-casting in real time; thought-casting with arcs or arc-casting your thoughts.
My hats off to Peter Terren, who is bringing the Tesla coil to a new level of science, art and fun. He is an inspiration to all thoughtful-tinkerers in the world.
Peter Terren has created a shocking new image of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ - by shooting 500,000 volts of electricity down his body as he sat in the pose.
Using a home-built Tesla coil pieced together from junk and bits from hardware stores, Peter Terren risked his life to make the electrifying image.
He was also only protected from painful death by electrocution by a layer of cheap builders’ foil.
Terren, from Bunbury, Western Australia,said: ‘I wanted to convey the concept of the modern electrical age with the barrage of electrical interference in our lives. So much is happening and demanding our attention that it is difficult to “think”.
‘I decided upon a real life posture like the thinker with a lot of electrical activity around me with sparks onto my body.’
Ahem.. (clears throat ready to talk-like-a-physicist).
It is remarkable how the magnitude of voltage has reduced by one - 50,000 volts in this article, 500,000 in the Daily Mail article versus the 200,000 mentioned on my site.
In fact we are all wrong. The peak voltage generated from a Tesl coil can be predicted by the ratio of inductances in a linked resonant system multiplied by the primary coil peak voltage. This is provided there is no load. Once the sparks start breaking out and a load develops in a chaotic manner, then there is no fixed value in what is a highly chaotic waveform which is modulated by the mains 50Hz, spark gap of 1400 BPS and system resonance of around 100kHz. The peak voltage may be considerably lower and depends in all likelihood on cosmic ray ionisation locally as a significant influence on spark directions and initiation.
But lets not bring celectial muons into the equation, lets just call it 200kV.
Around the World in 80 Telescopes: I am eagerly awaiting the start of the webcast of around the world in 80 telescope. It starts on 4/3/09 at 9.00 UT; so about an hour from now for me.
The 24-hour long webcast is organized by the European Southern Observatory for the International Year of Astronomy cornerstone project 100 Hours of Astronomy.
The webcast event follows night and day around the globe to visit some of the most advanced observatories on Earth and in space, exploring the universe in visible light and beyond.
The Gemini North Telescope (Hawaii, USA) and the large observatories at the summit of volcanic Mauna Kea are scheduled for the first stops in the program beginning April 3 at 1 Am PST.
Others on the schedule include the Swift Satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (Hanle, India), and the 10-meter South Pole Telescope and IceCube Neutrino Telescope (South Pole, Antarctica).
#Sunny is wearing neutrino repellent armor.
#Sunny : my Schrödinger cat is entangled; might need to call a quantum mechanic.
#Sunny : recession is so bad - I checked the value of pi yesterday and it has gone down to e.
#Sunny is using his pet butterfly to control chaos.
#Sunny is probing ink molecules with nonresonant light.
#Sunny is playing with photon entanglement.
#Sunny is in Metastable Equilibrium and likes it.
#Sunny is an isomer: similar composition but of dissimilar properties.
#Sunny is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere. He is a rebel.
* Sunny is so cool, he is measured in Kelvins.
* Sunny can see past the event horizon.
* Sunny is defying the uncertainty principle.
* Sunny is made up entirely of dark matter.
* Sunny is blue shifted.
* Sunny is circumpolar.
* Sunny is gravitational lensing
* Sunny is a part of Proton Proton chain responsible for the fusion on the Sun.
* Sunny is a supernova remnant
* Sunny is emanating Hawking radiation
* Sunny is made entirely out of strange quarks - that explains a lot!
* Sunny is cursed with non-zero vacuum energy
* Sunny is a boson.
* Sunny is in a phase lock with a wine glass.
* Sunny’s time arrow points in random direction - I’ll see you yesterday, may be.
* Sunny lives in a quantum constrained system
* Sunny is your long lost supersymmetric partner.
* Sunny is using gravitational lens to warm up earth.
* Sunny is a part of a binary blackhole system.
* Sunny thrives on curved space time.
* Sunny is a pseudo random number generator.
* Sunny is not the problem, he is not the solution - he is the math between the problem and the solution.
* Sunny might not be omnipotent, but under the right circumstances he is nilpotent.
* Sunny doesn’t follow gravity; gravity follows him.
Here are the status messages from the first list of physicist’s facebook status messages:
* Sunny feels the chill from the the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) being cooled to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space. Where did I put my space heater?
* Sunny feels like he’s diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
* Sunny exists purely as a probability density function; he can be at more than one places at the same time.
* Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.
* Sunny is still searching for Higgs.
* I abhor M theory with every fiber of my being.
* almost finished with the paper, I just has to dot my “i” and cross my “h”.
* Sunny has learned not to store plutonium in a tupperwear container.
* is pondering, if Schroedinger’s Cat walks into a forest, and no one is around to observe it, is he really in the forest?
* Wanted, dead AND alive, Schrödinger’s Cat.
A beautiful panoramic picture of Paris. 360 degree photo called Eiffel planet, was built from 80 pictures.
To create this effect, all you need to do is to use the “polar coordinate filter” and then use rotational filter in your photo editing software: hmmm.. why does that sound so familiar?
Our mind already does so much processing of the visual stimuli we receive, sometime it is good to start with raw data and reprocess it in a different way.
This picture shows the trajectory of a pendulum, as seen from the bottom. The pendulum bob is equipped with a white punctual light source, which emits in all directions. On the picture you can notice a drop in the amplitude, mainly caused by air friction. You can also notice that the ellipse traced during each cycle undergoes a precession, or a rotation of the major axis. As the amplitude increases relatively to the length of the pendulum, the period, or the time to complete a to and fro cycle, tends to increase also (non-harmonic oscillator). Since the amplitude of the major axis of the ellipse is greater than that of the minor axis, the periods of the major and minor axes are different, which brings the axes to oscillate out of phase and rotate.
This is the geekiest Facebook Status message I have posted
- my usual techniques are useless! Thank god for made by Godiva.
If you haven’t figured, is the chemical formula of two of the compounds in Chocolate. Taken from the master at XKCD.
Don’t try this at home! Your valentine might refuse to go out with you if she finds out that you are trying to use some deterministic equations with a quantity like Heart. Thankfully, my valentine speaks my physmathogeekinglish language.
Here is a better one:
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base
are belong to you
If you want some simplicity
But I like this 8 bit dynamic life - two t-shirt sets with red hearts; get within a hugging distance and the hearts light up!
Gamers (video game coders and players) are taking over the word “Physics” and I absolutely hate it!
I did a simple search for “car physics” on Google and 25% of the links on the first page are for coding the games and how to render the cars within the game!
For gamers to claim that what they are doing is physics is like the Italian plumber Mario to claim that he is the smartest cosmologist or most experienced astronaut ever because in Super Mario Galaxy , he traveled to seven different galaxies.
For gamers to claim that what they are doing is physics is like Salvador Dali to claim that his painting of warped clocks is same as warped space time of general relativity!
I know, some of you are going to point me to the definition of physics “the science of matter and energy and their interactions” and argue that “hey, the gamers are doing the same thing - they are implementing the relationship between the matter and energy and their interaction”; and of course you will be completely wrong.
Read the definition of Physics again - it is the science of matter and energy and their interactions. To decipher this definition, you need to understand what “science” is; and science is “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.” So Physics is “The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of matter and energy and their interactions”. Now tell me, if you think gamers are using the word physics in the same way.
Gamers take the crib sheet that physicists gave them and try to code it on the silicon chip or in the software. They might be doing the science of computer programming, but they are not doing science of matter and energy and their interactions!
I have a great deal of respect for their skill - I enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto, and Spores and Sims and Mario on Wii - and more power to them -but it is not the same as doing “physics”!
Major hardware developers are on the band wagon too: nVIDIA - Physics Graphic Cards; and cute ones like PhysX graphic cards - as if we wouldn’t notice. Reminds me of the Microsoft’s “The Intenet” on a disc; compare that to the nVidia or ATI “physics cards”.
Wow, all of Physics, on a chip with a little fan! how nice!
So call it something else - call it gPhysics, Gasics, Ghysics, iZysics, McPhysics, or something. Leave the word Physics alone.
I am warning you… if you continue to use the word Physics for some silly graphic tricks, we will have no choice but to withhold the laws of physics from you guys, like we do with cartoonists and for fine folks that draw anime.
Rings of Saturn are one of the most visually exciting and fascinating cosmic sights.
Given the picture of the rings and knowing that the Saturn is about 120,000 km, it seems that the rings have a diameter of about 250,000 km. And based on the picture, I would have guessed that the thickness of the ring must be about 5,000 - 10,000 km.
And of course that is wrong. The first time I looked it up, I was told that the rings are about 1-2 km thick… impossible, I said to myself. How can that be? Especially with 60 moons - and Titan which is the largest moon in the solar system, there must be tidal forces and forces that act asymmetrically when the moons are on the different sides of the planet. How can a complex system like that produce a sharp ring on 1-2 km.
And then we all learned that the thickness of the rings might actually be 10-30 meters!
Things in physics are never this sharp; they are always fuzzy, and have gradient. but thickness of 10 meters for a ring that has a diameter of 250,000 km is just unfathomable.
The rings are also dynamic, in the sense that the clusters within the ring come and go; dissolve and re-form somewhere; yet manage to stay within 10-30 meters.
Some have argued that the rings remain so tight because of all those moons - the moons act like traffic cops and keep them in line. Yah, sure.. take 60 orbiting objects of different size and different placement and they all conspire to have a razor sharp plane where everything settles down! May be it is true, but I just don’t buy it, not yet, anyway.
I see it, I read about it, I see all the calculations, but my astonishment is never diminished.
The physics is most interesting when the results are hard to fathom; The laws of physics retain the right to astonish you.
Sort of reminds me of a friend of mine - an aerospace engineer, who was doing his postdoc on helicopter dynamics. And once a while, he would just whirl his textbook or the journal he was reading and exclaim “I still don’t understand how this damn thing flies!!!’…. I sympathize with him, I still don’t understand how the rings of Saturn are so sharp and so stable.
here are four views of the rings:
(1) Sketch of Saturn by Galileo in 1616 and first sketch of a gap in the rings by Cassini from 1676.
(2) A short video of Saturn and its rings - from Bad Astronomy
(3) Sounds of Saturn rings - rings are very active source of radio waves. Cassini space craft captured these radio sounds.
(4) A-F rings and various gaps. The images in this view were obtained on May 9, 2007. Image scale is about 6 kilometers per pixel.
The Vocabulary column in NY Times had an interesting question:
I am warning you… if you continue to use the word Physics for some silly graphic tricks, we will have no choice but to withhold the laws of physics from you guys, like we do with 
