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2D Kepler Conjecture
Johannes Kepler asserted in 1611 that no packing of identical balls has density greater than the hexagonal close-packed “cannonball” packing of oranges at a grocery store’s fruit stand. But the gulf between intuition and proof was so large that the latter was not achieved until the work of Thomas Hales and Samuel Ferguson in 1998.…
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Mach Cutoff
Two weeks ago, I watched live via Starlink as the Boom Supersonic XB-1 test aircraft broke the sound barrier in level flight, the first all-civilian aircraft to do so. This success promises the return of commercial supersonic flight, at least over ocean. This week, during the final test flight, I learned that no sonic boom…
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Does a charge in gravity radiate?
Caltech, Saturday night, grad student pizza. The conversation turns to a famous general relativity puzzle: does an electric charge at rest in a gravitational field radiate? According to Einstein’s equivalence principle, a static homogeneous gravitational field is indistinguishable from constant acceleration in empty space, and as is well known, accelerating charges radiate. Does that mean…
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Sabbatical trip to Europe – Part 3 (Otto Rössler)
After the conference in Switzerland, I stopped in Tübingen, Germany to visit Otto Rössler. Nearly everyone who learned about nonlinear systems knows the nowadays named Rössler attractor and his work in chaos theory in the 1970s. For the last four years we were in contact for my science history project and this year, I finally…
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Aero thermo dynamics
Up early this morning to watch the spectacular fourth integrated flight test of SpaceX’s Superheavy Starship, the largest rocket ever built. Each IFT has greatly improved on the previous one, and the fourth was no exception. For the first time, both the booster and the ship softly splashed down in the ocean! Especially impressive was…
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Wooster’s Time Crystals
Saturday, March 8, 2008. A heavy snow, one of the heaviest I remember, shuts down the city of Wooster. Streets are undriveable, so I walk to Taylor Hall, getting snow in my boots. Taylor is deserted, as the College has begun Spring Break, but like yesterday, Kelly and I work all afternoon and evening in…
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Venus’s Supercritical Ocean
The pressure and temperature near the surface of Venus are so high that its carbon dioxide atmosphere is a global ocean of a remarkable state of matter, a supercritical fluid, which fills any container like a gas but is as dense as a liquid. I created a carbon dioxide pressure versus temperature phase diagram using…
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Summer of ’19
Due to the pandemic, the summer of 2019 was regrettably and unexpectedly my last Wooster summer research program, but the team was amazing. Niklas Manz and I obtained Sherman-Fairchild funding to work with Margaret McGuire ’20, Yang (Fish) Yu ’21, and Chase Fuller ’19 to computationally study reaction-diffusion phenomena. All three of their projects have…
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Chemistry Does General Relativity
I hired Kiyomi from Hawai’i for our NSF REU summer program in spring 2020 amidst fears of the pandemic that eventually postponed the program two years. When she finally arrived in summer 2022, I had already retired from Wooster, where my last year was completely remote, classes via Teams, but several of those included Daniel.…
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Magic Scroll
When I bought my house, I knew I would soon need to replace its heat pump, which was almost 20 years old. Earlier this month, with my old pump laboring under a cold snap, I upgraded to a new version, which boasts a history of elegant inventions. Powered by electricity, heat pumps circulate a low-boiling-point…
Category: Physics
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.