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Novel Math, Nobel Physics
When I was a kid I used to read Scientific American at the local library. I loved Martin Gardner‘s Mathematical Games column, and I vividly remember his description of Roger Penrose‘s then recent discovery of two shapes that force a nonperiodic tiling of the plane, an aperiodic tiling, a kind of visual music. Only later…
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Cookie Cutter
Cookie dough in a cookie factory moves on a conveyor belt at a constant relativistic speed. A circular cutter stamps out cookies as the dough rushes by beneath it. In the factory frame, the dough is length contracted along the conveyor belt, and when the conveyor belt stops and the cookies are packaged for eating,…
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Flying Silo
Yesterday, SpaceX successfully flew a full-sized Starship tank-section prototype at its launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Standing thirty meters tall without its nosecone, weighing one to two hundred tons with methalox propellant, and made from stainless steel, Starship was powered by a single Raptor engine, the first full-flow staged-combustion engine to fly. Operational Starships…
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Hot & Cold Electricity
As I kid, I used to help my dad with electrical wiring projects (among other things). I learned that home electricity was “hot & cold”, like water in pipes — or at least, that’s how I understood the explanation. Later I learned that home electricity uses alternating current (AC) rather than direct current (DC), and…
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Hamiltonian Flow
Newton wrote, “My brain never hurt more than in my studies of the moon [and Earth and Sun]”. Unsurprising sentiment, as the seemingly simple three-body problem is intrinsically intractable and practically unpredictable. … If chaos is a nonlinear “super power”, enabling deterministic dynamics to be practically unpredictable, then the Hamiltonian is a neural network “secret…
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Summer Highlight
Since the mid 1990s, a highlight of my year has been the Physics Department’s National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates summer program. Our research assistants come from Wooster and from all over the United States, as detailed in the accompanying bubble chart (where the bubble diameters code number of participants per institution). To date,…
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A Gigasecond at Wooster
A second ago, I posted this blog entry. A kilosecond ago, I wrote it. A megasecond ago, I isolated myself against the 2020 pandemic. A gigasecond ago, I began my career at The College of Wooster, which I celebrate today, 31.7 years later.
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Higgs Without Molasses
Although almost all ordinary mass effectively arises from the kinetic and binding energy of quarks and gluons bound to protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, the Higgs mechanism does endow some particles like quarks and weakons with intrinsic masses. Here I gently introduce the Higgs mechanism without using loose analogies like vacuum field viscosity. Stationary…
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The Tall Towers
In 1945, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” in Wireless World magazine. Clarke calculated a special orbit, about 36 000 km above the equator with a period of one sidereal day, in which artificial satellites would appear to hover motionless above Earth. The satellites…
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Losing Betelgeuse
At my computer Tuesday evening, I receive a message from a university physics chat that is both thrilling and chilling: LIGO + Virgo report a “burst” gravitational wave event, possibly due to a core-collapse supernova (or a binary collision where one object is in the hypothetical “mass gap” between black holes and neutron stars). The…
Author: John F. Lindner
Recent Comments
Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
David Smith’s ein stein is an awesome shape!
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Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.