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March Meeting Update – Days 2 & 3
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…
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March Meeting 2016 – Day 1!
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…
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Kelly Twin Paradox
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…
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A New Kind of Astronomy
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…
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Ticktock Deadbeat Escapement
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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ER = EPR?
This month is the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s November 1915 discovery of the gravitational field equations of General Relativity, in which test masses move along the straightest possible paths (called geodesics) in spacetime curved by the density and flux of energy and momentum (including mass and pressure). General Relativity allows spacetime to be topologically…
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Guest Blog – Nathan Johnson ’16
Over the past century or so humankind has achieved remarkable feats of science and engineering – at a cost. The impact that our innovations have on the environment has become exceedingly clear. As we progress toward better and faster ways to travel we need to be cognizant of the efficiency and impact of our modes…
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Guest Blog – Spencer Kirn ’16
This summer I have been working with Dr. Chris Crawford at the University of Kentucky. We have been trying to design a cosine theta coil, which is a magnetic coil that has a uniform magnetic field on the inside, but no field on the outside. Beyond this, we also wanted to create this magnet using…
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Wooster Physics in Prague, Glasgow, and Oxford!
Greetings! I have recently returned from a semester-long research leave, thanks to Wooster’s generous faculty leaves program. During my leave, I split my time between Wooster and the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford in the United Kingdom, in addition to a week-long conference in Prague, Czech Republic. In Wooster, I continued work in my lab with Clare Boothe Luce scholar Maggie Lankford…
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Guest Post: Michael Wolff ’17
When I first came to Wooster, I had no clue what discipline I would explore, and didn’t even take my first physics class until the second semester of my freshman year; now, I’m coming up on the end of my second month conducting research at Michigan State’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), one of the…
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.