Category Archives: Physics

We Are Going

John F. Lindner April 29, 2023 9:08 PM

After half a century confined to low-Earth orbit, and as soon as late next year, humans will once again leave Earth and voyage to Moon. The reality of this exciting adventure crystallized earlier this month when NASA announced the diverse … Continue reading →

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Generalizing Coulomb’s Law

John F. Lindner March 6, 2023 4:47 PM

The forces between two electric charges in arbitrary motion are complicated by velocity, acceleration, and time-delay effects. The forces need not even lie along the line joining the two charges! Suppose a source charge is at position with velocity and … Continue reading →

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Wooster Physics Alumni at Kent Displays

Susan Lehman March 3, 2023 10:51 AM

Three Wooster physics alumni who all work at Kent Displays, Inc. returned to campus last Thursday to share some info about the physics of liquid crystals as well as some of their personal journeys to Wooster and beyond. See more … Continue reading →

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Compton Generator

John F. Lindner January 19, 2023 12:12 PM

Long before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and while still a Wooster undergraduate, Arthur Compton realized a third way to demonstrate Earth’s spin (after pendulums and gyroscopes). Compton reported his results in a manuscript submitted to the journal … Continue reading →

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Perseverance, Ignition, Breakeven

John F. Lindner December 13, 2022 5:54 PM

Overcoming decades of enormous physics and engineering challenges, and despite persistent pessimism, skepticism, and criticism, the National Ignition Facility has achieved an historic milestone for controlled nuclear fusion, a target energy gain factor of . Last week, NIF focussed the world’s most powerful laser … Continue reading →

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Distant Retrograde Orbit

John F. Lindner December 8, 2022 6:16 PM

The Artemis 1 mission’s Orion spacecraft has successfully entered and exited a distant retrograde orbit about Moon. DRO is a stable and easily accessible orbit requiring a low velocity change . In DRO, Earth‘s non-negligible gravity contributes to a 3-body problem that … Continue reading →

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Zero-G Indicator

John F. Lindner October 11, 2022 2:12 PM

When Crew 5 rocketed to orbit last week aboard the SpaceX Dragon “Endurance” bound for the International Space Station, I was curious to see their zero-gravity indicator. A tradition SpaceX crews have adopted from Russian cosmonauts, the zero-g indicator is usually a … Continue reading →

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For the dinosaurs!

John F. Lindner September 26, 2022 8:26 PM

The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, but we do. I just watched live the first kinetic-impact asteroid-redirection test as NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft collided with the asteroid-moon Dimorphos of the asteroid Didymos. Below is the last image … Continue reading →

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Science, serendipity, and coincidence

Niklas Manz May 23, 2022 8:05 PM

As part of my science history project, the article “Science, serendipity, coincidence, and the Oregonator at the University of Oregon, 1969–1974” has been published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science. It’s especially exciting because it’s the Feature article … Continue reading →

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Alien Suns Reversing in Exoplanet Skies

John F. Lindner May 19, 2022 10:07 AM

Not only can suns stand still in the sky, from some exoplanets their motion can apparently reverse! Wooster physics-math double majors Xinchen (Ariel) Xie ’21 and Hwan (Michelle) Bae ’19 and I just published an article elucidating these apparent solar reversals. Michelle … Continue reading →

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