Professor Stephen Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics – Cambridge University.

Here he is in space:

Source : Brickshelf

And the ipod nano commercial:

My favorite Hawking quotes are:

Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.

God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

Just a personal note: I had the privilege of working with him when he agreed to serve as an advisor to one of the conference that I organized eons ago. The conference was titled “Black Holes, Membranes, Wormholes and Superstrings”. I co-edited a book based on the talks at the conference. See it at Amazon or at http://www.allbookstores.com/author/S_Kalara.html

I thought it might be interesting to start gathering up the Physics related Facebook Status Messages that I have been posting on my Facebook account.

Here are some of my favorites.

• 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.

Hopefully we will have plenty more by the time the next Talk Like A Physicist Day comes along (March 14, 2009).

Join the facebook group for the Talk Like A Physicsits by clicking here.

Meet new Mazda model Pi – replaces the Mazda model e (2.71)

EnglishRussia brings us some ghostly pictures of an abandoned lab designed to hunt the ghostly neutrinos.

Deep inside this mound there is an ex-to-be-very-secret Russian neutrino lab. It belongs to the Russian Nuclear Research Center and was build to explore the neutrino particle properties.
It is a multi stored underground lab which is on 1000 ft (330 meters) deep mark inside this hill. It is also 11,000 ft (3600 meters) long and contains hundreds of rooms with the equipment, mainly the neutrino detection radars.
This radars are big metal tanks filled with white-spirit that has a light emission detectors and multipliers. They register neutrino mini-blasts in this white spirit environment and sent the real time reports to the main computer you would see its terminal below.
These tanks with radars occupy many many rooms on different floors so that none of the neutrino folk could pass unnoticed here.

By neutrino detection radar, they probably mean the neutrino detectors. Not sure what White-spirit did they used. And there is a mention of a neutrino mini blast – presumably using the technique of smashing protons into a fixed target, producing charged pions or kaons and focusing the particles in a long tunnel where they decal while in flight.

The tunnel:

The detectors:

floors and floors of detectors everywhere:

More detectors:

The control system:

Long live neutrinos!

Neutrinos never dies, they just oscillate.

My favorite space dog Laika now has a statue in Moscow!

The monument was unveiled on the eve of Cosmonauts’ Day, marking Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin’s April 12, 1961 space flight.

At one time a stray wandering the streets of Moscow, she was selected from an animal shelter. Originally named Kudryavka (literally: “Little Curly-Haired One”), she was renamed Laika.

After undergoing training with two other dogs, she was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 and was launched into space on November 3, 1957.

Laika wasn’t the first animal sent in to space (fruit flies were the first), but she was the most recognizable one.

Russian authorities had previously circulated reports that Laika survived in orbit for four days and then died when the cabin overheated due to a battery malfunction.

In reality, medical sensors recorded that immediately after the launch, as her capsule reached speeds of nearly 18,000 miles per hour (28,800km/h), her pulse rate increased to three times its normal level, presumably due to overheating, fear and stress. Five to seven hours into the flight, no further life signs were received from Laika.

Between 1957 and 1966, a total of 13 dogs were used in Soviet space flights, many of whom were recovered unharmed. Laika was the only one Russian scientists knowingly sent into space to die

I have some sentimental attachment to Laika; my wife had a dog named Laika when she was growing up and I have seen pictures of her frolicking around.

What they say is true – dog is man’s best friend.

Source

Why are icicle long and thin?

Here is a great image of three icicles.

As water drips onto an icicle and freezes, it releases heat. The warm air rises up the sides of the icicle. That warm air layer acts like a blanket that’s an insulator, and so the blanket is very thin near the tip and thick at the top. That allows the top to grow very slowly and the tip to grow rapidly — creating a long, thin icicle.

The height of an icicle is proportional to the radius to the four third!

The apex angle is about 15 degrees

How the ripples form on the icicle issue has not been fully resolved yet. I am not even sure if the problem of optimal distance between the icicles has been resolved either!