Category: Physics

  • March Meeting — Guest Blog by Carlos Owusu-Ansah ’21

    Susan Lehman

    I thought the March APS meeting was fantastic. It felt great to present our research findings to people who cared about what Dr. Lindner and I were working on at the College. I attended fun talks about astronomical phenomena and learned many cool things about the evolution of our solar system. It is easy to…

  • March Meeting — Guest Blog by Katie Shideler ’21

    Susan Lehman

    Having never been to a physics conference, or even to the city of Boston, attending the annual American Physical Society’s March Meeting was all around a new and incredible experience. Being able to present my research to physicists from across the globe was nerve-racking but very insightful to get opinions of others who are far…

  • March Meeting 2019 Boston

    Susan Lehman

    I’m currently in Boston for the 2019 March Meeting, which is as exciting, overwhelming, and exhausting as usual! You may remember last March Meeting, we were in LA, which was naturally nice and warm.  Boston welcomed the March Meeting with one of the first big snow storms of the season — about 8 inches of…

  • Relativistic Colors

    John F. Lindner

    Metallium, Inc. is attempting to manufacture coins made from as many different metals (and elements) as possible, typically 99 to 99.9% pure. My Metallium coin collection currently includes aluminum, titanium, iron, nickel, copper, zinc, silver, tin, and gold coins. Most metals are silvery gray because they absorb ultraviolet light and reflect visible light. However, relativistic…

  • 720° untangles 360° tangles

    John F. Lindner

    Despite growing up in three dimensions, as a kid I did not recognize one of 3D’s deep and subtle properties: full rotations tangle, but double rotations untangle! Following physicist Paul Dirac, twist a belt one full turn about its length. The 360° single twist cannot be undone without changing the belt buckles’ orientations, although the twist…

  • 1+2+3+… = -1/12?

    John F. Lindner

    In quantum electrodynamics, the bare charge of an electron is infinite, but the renormalized dressed charge is finite. The bare electron shields itself by polarizing the virtual electron-positron pairs of the nearby quantum vacuum to reduce its coupling at large distances to in natural units, where the “I” decorating the equals sign denotes an informal relationship. Renormalization techniques help…

  • A Better Table

    John F. Lindner

    The periodic table of the elements is almost as old as The College of Wooster, and I am a big fan. As we approach next year’s sesquicentennial of Dmitri Mendeleev‘s 1869 periodic table, I present a modest addition to the over 600 known periodic tables, which include , , and even designs! I wanted the…

  • Math Grenade

    John F. Lindner

    I just bought a new calculator. New to me, that is, but older than me. Inspired by the 1600s Gottfried Leibniz stepped cylinder and the 1800s Thomas de Colmar arithmometer, the Curta mechanical calculator design was developed by Curt Herzstark while imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II. Curta calculators were manufactured between…

  • Optical Tweezers

    John F. Lindner

    A focused light beam can trap a small particle, such as a micron-sized latex sphere (or biological cell). If the sphere is much larger than the light’s wavelength, ray optics suffices to explain the trapping. Light bends as it passes through the sphere, as in Fig. A. The piconewton forces (red and blue arrows) on…

  • Dr. Rendezvous

    John F. Lindner

    Edwin Aldrin earned his PhD from MIT in 1963 with a thesis titled, “Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous”. Just three years later in 1966, Aldrin was the pilot of Gemini XII, the last flight of the Gemini program, a critical precursor to the Apollo moon program. Aldrin and his commander James Lovell were…

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