Theoretically awesome Pedometer just for us!

Among other things, Einstein’s theory of special relativity says that as an object’s velocity increases, time as experienced by the object will slow down when compared to another object traveling at a lower velocity. This means that a “relatively” short round trip on a space ship traveling at close to the speed of light would see you arrive home having aged less than those back on Earth. While the greater the velocities involved, the greater the effect, the theory applies to all relative movement. Now there’s an iPhone app that will let you know just how many extra nanoseconds you’ve gained by getting moving as opposed to sitting on your rear end.

To calculate just how much time you’ve gained by walking to the shops, the Einstein’s Pedometer app uses the iPhone’s GPS capabilities and the Lorentz transformation, which describes how two observers’ varying measurements of space and time can be converted into each others frame of reference. A quick stroll round the neighborhood with Einstein’s Pedometer yielded me an extra 0.00021440 nanosconds.

I just downloaded it. It is free as well, because Physicists are very frugal with time and are not known for being very wealthy either!

Also, next time I am caught speeding, I can tell the police that I was just trying to contract time.

Via Gizmodo & Book of Joe

I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of physicists cried out in confusion, and were suddenly silenced by a plot (from LHC data).

Looks like the Supersymmetry is dead! *

Last week, the anticipated signs of SUSY were missing from the early data generated by the LHC’s two experiments, ATLAS and CMS.

This is almost as bad as having a decade long on-line relationship with your “soul mate”, and then finding out that your love interest on the other side was a Nigerian scammer.

No love for low scale supersymmetry at the LHC.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2357

Don’t be upset about this. We are physicists, we are always open to the possibility that our ideas may be wrong.

Physicists: social, fair if not generous toward colleagues, open to the possibility that their ideas may be wrong, and remarkably willing to accept criticism.

* I know, it is only the Minimum Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) that seems to be in trouble. With 150 known parameters and unknown numbers of other unknowns, it can never be ruled out.

Oh the puns one can make..

First there were blackholes and hair, and now there are blackholes and balls. .. or blackholes with bubbles…

I am not surprised as this. Milky way is a thin disk and in the perpendicular direction there is something going on… May be thats what keeps the disk so thin!

Above is a cartoon picture to summarize the observations of the Fermi bubble structures. Two blue bubbles symmetric to the
Galactic disk indicate the geometry of the gamma-ray bubbles observed by the Fermi -LAT. Morphologically, we see corresponding features
in ROSAT soft X-ray maps, shown as green arcs embracing the bubbles. The WMAP haze shares the same edges as the Fermi bubbles
(the pink egg inside the blue bubbles) with smaller extension in latitude. These related structures may have the same physical origin: past
AGN activities or a nuclear starburst in the GC (the yellow star).

Actual pictures are like watching a poor ultrasound and trying to figure out the features.

Source

GIANT GAMMA-RAY BUBBLES FROM Fermi -LAT: AGN ACTIVITY OR BIPOLAR GALACTIC WIND?
Meng Su, Tracy R. Slatyer Douglas P. Finkbeiner

Yes, I plead guilty to this. I have done this so often that it is not even funny.

The really funny part is that this method works 90% of the time. I still don’t understand why they need a whole journal, sometimes even several journals, for <that field>.

From XKCD

Of course one knows about the astroid belt, but it has never been visualized as clearly as this image and the compendium video shows.

Click for a better view or visit Current Map of the Solar System

The terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) are shown on the diagram by Cyan or White squares, and their orbits are represented by the blue ellipses around the Sun (the yellow dot at the centre). The Earth is highlighted because of its special importance to us. Small green points mark the location of asteroids which do not approach close to the Earth right now. This does not exclude the possibility that they will do so in the future but generally we can consider the Earth to be safe from these for the near future. Yellow objects (with the exception of the one in the middle which we astronomers call the Sun ;-) are Earth approaching asteroids which are called Amors after the first one discovered. Amors have orbits which come close to the Earth but they don’t cross the Earth’s orbit. However, their orbits are close enough to the Earth that they could potentially be perturbed by the influence of the planets and begin to cross the Earth’s orbit in a short time. There are over 300 known objects on such orbits.

It is estimated that there are perhaps 100,000 to 1,000,000 undiscovered asteroids on similar Earth crossing orbits.

And here is a video of astroids as they are discovered over the last 30 years. If you prefer, you can view the last 30 seconds to see the current known density of the astroids. I am sure additional astroids will be discovered but I suspect the density map will probably remain the same.

Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You’ll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video.

As the video moves into the mid 1990′s we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you’ll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner.

At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that’s tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates snow no sign that we’re running out of undiscovered objects.

Thank You Scott Manley for making this video – astroid belt has never been so real to me.

The Vocabulary column in NY Times had an interesting question:

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.

Talk Like a Physicist

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!

Talk Like a Physicist

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.

The old ones are here.

Talk Like a Physicist

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.’

Source Tesla Down Under

[UPDATE] Note from Peter Terren:

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.

(Oh and by the way, that’s me)

Talk Like a Physicist

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.

Go here to watch it.

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).

Talk Like a Physicist

Bozone: noun, The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.

Egoravity: noun, the physical force identified in Newton’s (unpublished) fourth law of physics– that everything revolves around me.

From Addictionary.

Talk Like a Physicist

#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.

Previous ones are reproduced here:

* 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.

Talk Like a Physicist

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.

For more 3D – Wee Planet pictures of Paris, see here. And you can see more Wee Planet pictures of interesting vistas here.

If you want to make your own planet – use planetizer!

Talk Like a Physicist

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.

Credits Richard Germain

Talk Like a Physicist

Source : Brightly Wounded

Talk Like a Physicist

[math] H\heartsuit= E\heartsuit;sin(\heartsuit), d\heartsuit/dt [/math] – my usual techniques are useless! Thank god for [math] C_4H_8O_2 +C_7H_8N_4O_2 [/math] made by Godiva.

If you haven’t figured, [math] C_4H_8O_2 +C_7H_8N_4O_2 [/math] 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. [math] \heartsuit \heartsuit \heartsuit [/math]

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!

Talk Like a Physicist

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.

Trust me, you don’t want a mob of angry physicists on your tail… we have black holes and all your bases are belong to us.

Talk Like a Physicist