Talk Like A Physicist

Tuesday Physics Tattoos: CERN bubble chamber tracks tattoos:

Bubble chamber tracks are so beautiful and having a tattoo of the actual tracks is very special.

Considering that LHC will start tonight, there was an interesting comment about this tattoo:

You have a potential end of the effing universe tattooed on your arm. Well done, sir.

For additional pictures of this tattoo, please see Lofidelity’s Flickr

Here is another tattoo of the same bubble chamber track image.

The original track image looks like this:

Here, the particles in the beam, which comes in from the left, are pions, the short-lived particles discovered originally in cosmic rays. One has interacted with a proton in the liquid near the upper left, to create a spray of new particles. One of these was a neutral (uncharged) particle, which left no track, but revealed its existence when it decayed nearer the centre of the image, to produce two charged particles that leave behind a sideways V shape.

The chamber was located in a magnetic field, which made positive particles curve to the right, and negative particles to the left. Particles with high energies, including the beam particles, curve almost imperceptibly, but particles with lower energies produce fascinating spirals. These are mainly due to electrons knocked from atoms in the liquid hydrogen.

You are not famous until there is a lego model of you: Lego Hawking

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

Hubble 4.0 : Upgrade Prep in Glorious Pictures

I consider Hubble as an extension of my eyes and the distances it sees as an extension of my vision. It can see 12-13 Billion light years away, so it was like my vision is 20/17×10^23!

Glad to see that the Hubble is getting an update! (Service Mission 4)

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch next month (October 8th), carrying new instruments, batteries and gyroscopes to the Hubble Space Telescope. This will be the final servicing mission to Hubble.

A technician performs black light inspection on Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, one of three main instruments being taken to Hubble aboard Atlantis. Black light inspection uses UVA fluorescence to detect possible particulate microcontamination, minute cracks or fluid leaks

Practicing underwater on Hubble Model.

Servicing Mission 4 astronauts practice on a Hubble model underwater at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston under the watchful eyes of NASA engineers and safety divers.

For more beautiful pictures, visit Boston Globe’s Big Picture Blog.

Tuesday Physics Tattoos: Fractal Mandelbrot tattoos

This is just the first of many sessions. In a week, after it heals, this outline will be tightened up so that it’s more regular. Then comes the colouring The above is only part of the entire tattoo. We’re doing a 3/4 sleeve of mandelbrot zooms.

Source: flamingnerd

Got this ink done last night! The tattoo is in the shape of a Mandelbrot set, which to me, is symbolic of infinity, regeneration, life, knowledge and enlightenment.

Source Stacy : She Dreams in Digital

Source Broox

The Mandelbrot set, named after Benoit Mandelbrot, is a fractal. Fractals are objects that display self-similarity at various scales. Magnifying a fractal reveals small-scale details similar to the large-scale characteristics.

Here is a 3D animation of a Julia Set, a type of Mandelbrot fractal set.

Obey the laws of physics - everything else you do is optional

Obey the laws of physics - everything else you do is optional - especially when you are driving.

A bumper sticker

Gamma Ray Sky Map

A view of the entire sky captured by the recently launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope shows bright radiation coming mostly from the Milky Way’s galactic plane.

Using the craft’s first 95 hours of active observation, mission scientists produced a map of gamma ray sources as seen from Earth that shows the same level of detail as previous maps that took more than a year to create.

In addition to the full-sky map, the first data from Fermi’s burst monitor include records of “a gamma ray burst about once a day … the highest rate of detection of any satellite,”

The scale of Gamma Ray bursts:

The intense flashes of gamma rays can release within seconds the same amount of energy that the sun will put out over its entire ten-billion-year lifetime.

Tuesday Physics Tattoos: Electronic Circuit tattoos

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Many of these circuit tattoos are of Moog filter - a circuit used in the synthesizer.

There is so much physics in the Moog synthesizer. It allowed a visual way to manipulating the sound waves. In addition it also allowed the user to control the amplitude modulation and frequency modulation.

SCIENCE : If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doing’ it right.

Click for a better view.

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This is the age of precision cosmology

This is the age of so-called precision cosmology

In an interesting article in NY Times about the struggle to measure cosmic expansion , the quip that I found the most pithy was about how the precision cosmology has become so important.

I know, it is an old statement; in July 1999, Wendy Freedoman announced that “after all these years, we are finally entering an era of precision cosmology”; and one could argue that the one of the first proof of relativity with perihelion of mercury can also be called “precision cosmology”; but every time I hear the statement, it sounds truer.

You know that the cosmology is gotten very precise, when a top forty band sings a love song, and in passing mentions that the universe is 12 billion yrs old; and she is challenged on it and asked to correct her lyrics to accurately reflect that the universe is really 13.7 billion yrs old!

Katie Melua’s bad science

There is so much physics yet to be explored and extracted from the precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background. The precision power decay and and the spectra measurements of various supernova bursts will tell us so much about the internal structure of these objects. Precision cosmology with weak gravitational lensing has helped us figure out the distribution of dark matter.

Like in any other precision experiments, there are systematic errors that one needs to be mindful of, but in the next decade we will learn so much from the precisely measured cosmic dance moves.

Tuesday Physics Tattoos : Solar System Tattoos

Solar System:

Source. Interestingly, this is an old tattoo where they left out Pluto because clear pictures weren’t available. And by cosmic coincidence, Pluto is no longer a planet!

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From Chris.
THE ORIGINAL SUN AND MOON WAS JUST REDONE WITH THE ADDED PLANETS MORE IS ON THE WAY

Ira Klotzko, a computer programmer in Jersey City, has finally decided to get a tattoo, after waiting until he was 38. Now, here’s the interesting part. Because of his life-long love of astronomy, he’s decided to have the entire solar system tattooed on his stomach. He says he thought of the idea while lying in bed one night, then gave himself a year to decide if he still wanted to do it. He jokes to New York Post that “it’s really accurate because the universe is also expanding.”

Solar System
The Sun/Earth/Moon in the middle, surrounded by the other 8 planets (YES, Pluto is included). An asteroid running down the side of it, with “…And it makes me wonder” a quote from Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”.

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Just FYI: American Academy of Dermatology says that about 25% of Americans 18 - 50 have received tattoos.

Quantum Physics Tattoos : Schrödinger equation

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One of the central equations in Quantum Physics is the Schrödinger equation.

The Schrodinger equation plays the role of Newton’s laws and conservation of energy in classical mechanics - i.e., it predicts the future behavior of a dynamic system.

It is a wave equation in terms of the wavefunction which predicts analytically and precisely the probability of events or outcome. The detailed outcome is not strictly determined, but given a large number of events, the Schrodinger equation will predict the distribution of results.

Dark Matter … Its Out there… Poster

2006 Physics Poster competition.

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The quantum physics of Creation

In The Beginning.

Start With One Proton Schrodinger’s equation, one of the most basic and formative equations of quantum physics, shown in the case of Hydrogen, a basic and formative element of the universe.

And Let There Be Light The famous Maxwell equations: the basic laws of light. The dynamics of electromagnetic radiation shown in mathematical terms.

Timespace The principle of Time dilation, a mathematical expression of time and space, as captured in Lorentz’s equation.

FreeWill The fundamental principle of uncertainty that underlies quantum physics: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

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