Category: Physics

  • Wooster Physics in Okinawa, Japan!

    Cody Leary

    During the week before spring break, I had the opportunity to visit the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) on a research collaboration.   OIST is a graduate university in Japan that accepts only Ph.D. candidates in the sciences, and is located on Okinawa, a subtropical island in the East China Sea, a few hundred miles from…

  • Dream a Little Dream of Physics — guest blog by Justine Walker

    Susan Lehman

    Dream a Little Dream of Physics – Fulfilling a Dream at the World’s Largest Meeting of Physicists           I don’t dream small. Ever since I was a young girl, I dreamed of a bright, big future for myself. Framed on my desk at school is a picture I drew from the prompt “A scientist is…”…

  • March Meeting — guest blog from Avi Vajpeyi

    Susan Lehman

    I was honoured to attend the APS meeting in Baltimore between 14-19 March. The meeting was amazing—though I found myself oscillating between: “I get this” to “Umm… I think I understand some of what they are talking about” to “Really? What are they talking about?”. Overall, a five star rating, if you ask me! There…

  • March Meeting Day 5

    Susan Lehman

    Whew! It’s been a while since I have been at the March Meeting for the full week, and I definitely reached information overload.  But before signing off, I wanted to summarize Day 5, Friday! There were a number of interesting choices in the morning, but I chose to go hear Miles Padgett of the University…

  • March Meeting – Seeing Optics Everywhere

    Susan Lehman

    I spent only part of Day 4 at the meeting in Baltimore.  After some sessions in the morning, I got to tour some of the Johns Hopkins engineering facilities and hear more about the research that Elliot Wainwright is doing there. Then I took the train down to Washington DC in the afternoon so that I…

  • March Meeting Update – Days 2 & 3

    Susan Lehman

    I knew when I posted the Day 1 update from the March Meeting that it would be pretty hard to keep up daily updates, and I was right! The students arrived on Tuesday morning, and Drew did a great job with his poster at the Tuesday afternoon poster session. We all had dinner together at…

  • March Meeting 2016 – Day 1!

    Susan Lehman

    I’m at the March Meeting in Baltimore this week — Day 1 was today, which is so appropriate since it is both Einstein’s birthday and Pi Day!  They were giving away pie at the APS booth in celebration. The March Meeting is the largest gathering of physicists in the world, so it’s always bursting with…

  • Kelly Twin Paradox

    John F. Lindner

    Yesterday astronaut Scott Kelly returned from nearly a year in free fall aboard the International Space Station to join his identical twin brother Mark back on Earth. Due to their different spacetime paths, I estimate that Scott aged about 9 ms less than his brother, and therefore travelled about 9 ms into the future, becoming one of…

  • A New Kind of Astronomy

    John F. Lindner

    One of the first things I did as a grad student in 1982 was tour the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) prototype on the Caltech campus about a block from my dorm. It was housed in a utilitarian L-shaped building wrapped around the corner of another building. I toyed with the idea of working…

  • Ticktock Deadbeat Escapement

    John F. Lindner

    The escapement is one of history’s greatest inventions; it enables a collection of wood or metal to tell time. The animation below illustrates a pendulum clock’s deadbeat escapement, apparently introduced by Richard Townseley, Thomas Tompion, and George Graham in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The escapement wheel transfers energy to the pendulum to overcome…

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