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For Teague
Sadly and unexpectedly Wooster physics senior Teague Curless ’22 died yesterday. I was fortunate to teach Teague some physics, especially in my Nonlinear Dynamics class last spring. Teague’s semester project beautifully illustrated chaos in a double pendulum — a pendulum swinging from another pendulum, like The Swinging Sticks® kinetic sculpture that silently rotates and librates beside…
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Spinors
Fermions like electrons, protons, and neutrons inhabit a 720° world: 360° rotations negate their quantum states, but 720° rotations restore them. A simple macroscopic model of such spinors is an arrow translating on a Möbius strip: as the center circle rotates, the attached arrow flips after 360° but flips back after 720°. In Dirac notation but…
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Transition
As I transition to emeritus status tomorrow, I reflect on 33 years at Wooster. I am thankful for the freedom I’ve had to design my own courses, including eight first-year seminars; for the flexibility to explore a wide range of research topics, from celestial mechanics to biophysics to dancing in reduced gravity; and for six…
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Free-Fall Spinning Tunnels
Jump into an evacuated hole drilled straight through a uniform, static Earth-like sphere. Accelerate to 7.9 km/s (or 18 000 m.p.h.) at the center, then decelerate back to zero at the antipodes 42 minutes later! Step out of the hole upside down — or return 84 minutes after you left. Last fall, as part of his senior thesis,…
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Geographic Tongue
The improbable email was from a pre-dental math major asking about physics research projects combining math and dentistry, but my reaction was, “Yes — only at Wooster!”. Like animated tattoos, the surface patterns of benign migratory glossitis slowly move on the human tongue. I knew my colleague Niklas Manz was working with my dentist to model…
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Nightfall
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system. I think of “Nightfall”. The six stars of TCY 7037-89-I orbit each other in three binary pairs, as in the schematic. The primaries are slightly larger and hotter than our sun and the secondaries are about a half as large and a…
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Chemical Clock
Wooster’s summer 2019 Sherman-Fairchild group just published, “Disruption and recovery of reaction–diffusion wavefronts interacting with concave, fractal, and soft obstacles”, in Physica A. Working with Fish Yu ’21, Chase Fuller ’19, Margaret McGuire ’20, and Niklas Manz (Physics) was wonderful. Extending previous work with Reba Glaser (SUNY Geneseo)’19 and Nate Smith ’18, we wrote computer…
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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…
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.