Talk Like A Physicist

Atom in a Box visualization - interactive quantum wave functions

Atom in a Box (Universal Application, v1.1), (for mac)

This beautiful program raytraces through a three-dimensional cloud density that represents the wavefunction’s probability density and presents its results in real-time (up to 48 frames per second on the latest hardware). The user interface is very interactive and provides a wide degree of flexibility.

It contains all 140 eigenstates up to the n=7 energy level and the allowed spectral transitions between those eigenstates. It also allows a state formed by a superposition (see below) of up to eight of those eigenstates allowing for over 3 trillion possible states. The program can display a wavefunction as a picture of a cloud, use color as phase, plot in red-cyan left/right for 3D glasses, and slice the wavefunction.

As Nick Herbert at A Quantum Mantra points out

Dauger’s program (called Atom in a Box) lets you not only talk (like a physicist) but lets you make your own home movies of quantum wavefunctions, probably the closest humans will get in my lifetime to visualizing “what atoms really look like”. Sophisticated enough to satisfy a real physicist yet easy enough for a normal person to use to toy with the structure of the universe at a very basic level. It’s a great way to learn about quantum mechanics.

Universcale - Physics is all about Scales - an interactive demo of scales from nano meter to nonillion meters

We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes?

See our Universcale and experience the sizes of various objects.

This is a remarkably beautiful interactive website that takes you from the nano meter sized structure to something as big as the size of the universe.

The part that I really like about this demo is that there is no sudden and unexplained transition from using the scale of meters or kilometers in describing things around us to something that is described in light years when we shift to explaining the cosmos.

To understand a distance of “a light year”, the reader has to know and appreciate the speed of the light (most can’t fathom it), he/she has to have the imagination to figure out how much does light travel in a year (most people can’t even tell you how many seconds there are in a year); and then has to transpose its natural instinct of using “year” to describe time to using a light year to describe distance. I think that is asking for way too much from an uninitiated user.

A light year is about 10 trillion kilometers. So the factor of 10^16 remains unappreciated and misunderstood.

But I digress; the Universcale is an interesting way to grapple with the scales of things around you, starting from atoms to the far away galaxies that you see. Check it out.

Size matters, or so this website will have it. This amazing site shows you scale as you have probably never seen it - from the smallest speck to the largest asteroid and beyond. Fantastic graphics will give you a real idea of your place on the planet - or indeed the universe.

Via Webupon Unverscale website.

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!

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

Dynamic Magnetic Field as animated images –> Magnetic Movie

Magnetic fields are invisible, at least usually. But Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory have made them visible as “animated photographs,” using sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing. It makes the fields dance in an absolutely gorgeous movie called Magnetic Movie.

This is the best depiction of solar wind that I have seen.

This is just a visualization of the fields that were present in the space at the time of the filming.

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

Source

Gamma Ray Sky View

The reason we “see” specific frequencies of light, or alternatively, our brains have acquired the capability to interpret the signals coming to the eyes in a certain narrow band of electromagnetic waves, is because of two things (i) particular properties of the spectra arriving from the Sun, and (ii) the specific photo synthesis process that became dominant and gave the green color to our food.

In an alternate world, depending on its own star, and its own food chain, one can imagine an alien being acquiring a capability to “see” in a different frequency band.

Sometimes I tell my eight year daughter science fiction stories based on “real science”, and we have a recurring character called Gammon, and he comes from a planet where the inhabitants are lead based and their food supply is radioactive metal and they “see” in hard X-ray/soft gamma ray spectrum.

If they were to look up in the sky, this is what they would see:

night sky in gamma ray spectrum; not too different from how the sky looks in the visible spectrum.

In case you are wondering as to how the earth will look in the gamma ray spectrum, wonder no more.

The pixelated planet above is actually our own planet Earth seen in gamma rays.

The Earth’s gamma-ray glow is indeed very faint, and this image was constructed by combining data from seven years of exposure during the life of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, operating in Earth orbit from 1991 to 2000. Brightest near the edge and faint near the center, the picture indicates that the gamma rays are coming from high in Earth’s atmosphere. The gamma rays are produced as the atmosphere interacts with high energy cosmic rays from space, blocking the harmful radiation from reaching the surface.

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Gorgeous picture of a (solid state) Tesla coil discharge

Click for a better view.

Shifting temporary equilibrium : burning candles at both end

the candle is perfectly balanced in the center and each end is lit at different times, the the wax melts on each end of the candle, and when it drips off of one end, that end becomes less in weight than the other, causing an imbalance of weight and making it tilt, when this happens, the same thing happens on the other end of the candle, creating a seesaw effect.

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I Will Derive : All physics students should learn this

First I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept on thinking “I can’t do this”
With x on each side

I tried to think, control my nerve,
…

when I had given up all hope, I said

NO,…..

I”LL DERIVE

Derive from first principles!

If you can’t do it, you don’t know your subject.

From mindofmathew at YouTube or at MindofMathew.com