Category: Physics

  • 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…

  • ER = EPR?

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Guest Blog – Nathan Johnson ’16

    Susan Lehman

    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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