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.

I heart math and I heart physics.

I’d even vote for replacing the final thesis defense with the PhD dance. If you truly understand the subject, you should be able to perform an interpretive dance about it.

Dance Your PhD facebook Group is here. You can see the latest entries.

Here is a sample from 2009 – Understanding turbulence to use magnetically confined fusion.

Via World’s Fair – Vince LiCata

Its just wrong for all of them to be on the same plane..

Facebook Status messages – Physics Edition.

Yes, I am a statustician… once a day, I have to think about something witty, funny or mundane thing to say about whats happening around me… yes, I can manage that! I take special delight in coming up with esoteric ones.

Here are a few that are physics related. Many of these will require a google/wikipedia search or Arxiv archive search, but thats the fun part of it.

.. is inventing “Oil of Olay DM”, made entirely out of dark matter, to smooth out the wrinkles in space time.

is modifying general relativity.

is redshifted by 2.2; you figure out how far I am.

has a radio halo.

is going through a quantum phase transition.

is a perfect hologram.

is experiencing Lorentz contraction.

is time herding.

is doing aperiodic tiling of his bathroom floor.

is trying to reduce his Erdos Number.

is looking for some nano-blackhole cream to patch up a naked singularity.

and here is a non-physics related funny one:

I just change the name of my ipod to “the titanic” so whenever I plug it in to my computer it says “the titanic is syncing”.

You can see more physics related facebook status messages here.

Instructions on how to talk like a physicist are in the FAQ

Here are some terms that Physicists use:

Order of Magnitude: Use terms like “orders of magnitude” to describe significant differences of scale.

Negligible: When something is small, say it is “negligible” non-zero, but negligible.

Infinitesimal: If it is really really small, say it is infinitesimal.

Non-trivial: For a physicist, nothing is ever hard or difficult – it is always “non-trivial”

First-order approximation : That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order approximation.”

Extrapolation: A semi-educated guess is an extrapolation
Ideal Case: You aren’t ignoring details, you are taking the ideal case

Want some physics related Facebook Status messages?

Sunny is applying irresistible force to an immovable object.
Sunny is Blue shifted
Sunny believes in emergent gravity
Sunny is self diffused.
Sunny calculates everything from first principles.

Hydrogen: one proton, one electron – check;

Oxygen (atomic number 8, atomic mass 16): you can see about 5 protons and 5 neutron, which is about right – you see half of the total from one side – check, two electrons in the s orbit of oxygen – check,

total eight electrons attributable to Oxygen and two for two hydrogen – check,

you see the molecular bonding between hydrogen and oxygen atoms – check, positioning of the hydrogen relative to oxygen – check,

wave-particle duality and localization stuff – not so perfect, but at least there is some fuzzy stuff there,

hydrogen shown as a perfect circle even in the presence of an Oxygen atom that it is bonding with, not perfect but hard to complain about it in light of other stuff that is right.

Jerry comments:

Enjoying a career measuring and predicting stream flow I spend a lot of time in, over and around water. I thought a tat of a water molecule would be just the thing. Talented tattoo artist Rose helped with advice and skill to make my first tattoo an enjoyable experience

Source: Via TattooBlog at Carl Zimmer’s blog Loom.

If you are interested in Science Tattoos, there is no place better then to visit Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo emporium. He recently moved his blog to Discover magazine; one more reason to give a plug to his blog with the new address.

If cuteness were a fundamental force, the plushies from ParticleZoo would be the strongest attractors in the universe.

Check out the plushies from the particlezoo, you can get just one, starting at $9.75 or get a whole universe in a box. Handmade wholesomeness, with a dose of particle physics and a sprinkle of whimsy!

Visit them at http://www.particlezoo.net

No, this is not photoshopped.

Marc Strömberg is a 22-year-old graphic designer in Ume, Sweden, and his leg is still sore. He creates record sleeves and posters for bands, and in his spare time he runs his own magazine, Tare Lugnt. Instead of publishing the latest edition in traditional paper and ink, he has had issue three entirely tattooed onto his left leg. The leg has now been photographed, and large-scale prints are due to go on display in Göteborg and Stockholm this month.

Source Tare Lugnt (which means “take it easy” in Swedish).

I don’t think I will ever remove a tattoo. Like I said, every tattoo is like a journal entry, and it represents different periods and places in my life.

This Dilbert cartoon really hits home, because I am both a physicist and an attorney!

So anybody want to incorporate in another universe? Want to buy some real estate in another dimension? Want to find a loophole using a worm-hole, I can help you with that! Trust me, I wrote a book about it.

I would have expected a cartoon like this from XKCD, not from Dilbert!

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.

Source http://exp.bmezine.com/

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.

The old ones are here.

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)

My favorite irrational number, with my favorite drink!

A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak”.

Physics isn’t immune to LOLcats either.

antigravity Lolcats

Source