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Spring Outreach Events
Spring is a big time for outreach here at Wooster Physics. The Physics Club runs demonstrations for local elementary schools, doing often two outreach visits a week during the spring. (In the fall, we are usually prepping for this flurry of events — sending letters to the schools and doing scheduling, and training new students…
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On Mercury One Day Lasts Two Years
Mercury has the most noncircular or eccentric orbit of any nondwarf planet in the solar system. This eccentricity has trapped Mercury in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, where it rotates three times for every two revolutions. When nearest Sun at perihelion, Sun’s tidal forces are greatest, Mercury’s spin and orbit (or rotation and revolution) nearly match,…
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Dynamo
Stationary electric charges generate radial electric fields, and electric fields push positive charges (and pull negative charges). Moving charges also generate circulating magnetic fields, and magnetic fields deflect moving charges perpendicular to both the fields and their motions. All of electromagnetism follows. In particular, spin a conducting disk in a perpendicular magnetic field, and connect its axle to its…
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March Meeting 2018 – Days 2 to 4!
The March Meeting is always so exciting — there is so much information here! On Tuesday morning, I went to an outstanding session on Atomic Origami. There is some truly amazing work out there with people designing shapes of graphene (mostly) that fold up on their own into boxes or flowers. Post-doc Marc Miskin gave…
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Electronic Kilogram
The kilogram is the only metric unit still defined by an artifact. The International Prototype Kilogram, IPK or “Le Grand K”, is a golf-ball-sized platinum-iridium cylinder in a vault outside Paris. This year I expect the General Conference on Weights and Measures to replace the IKP by an electronic realization that balances gravitational and electrical power.…
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Newton’s Can(n)on
One of my favorite illustrations is the cannon thought experiment from volume three of Isaac Newton‘s Principia Mathematica. Johannes Kepler argued that planets orbit elliptically with Sol at one focus. Galileo Galilei argued that terrestrial bodies fall parabolically in space and time. Living in the next generation and standing on their shoulders, Newton realized that…
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Ein Stein
I’ve been fascinated by aperiodic tilings of the plane since Martin Gardner first wrote about them in Scientific American. In the 1960s, Robert Berger discovered a set of 20 426 prototiles or tile-types that can tile the plane but only with no translational periodicity — a wonderful mix of the expected and the surprising, a kind of…
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Gossamer Flight
As a kid, I devoured the pages of Popular Science magazine and was fascinated by the quest for human-powered flight: Was a flying bicycle possible? In the mid 1970s, I read that aerospace engineer Paul MacCready had assembled a team to build a large, lightweight, human-powered aircraft that could be rapidly repaired and redesigned. In…
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Variable stars with the Wooster observatory (Jr IS guest blog by Nate Moore)
The night sky is full of wonder and splendor. Stars, many more than one can count by themselves, and what a great expanse it truly is, reaching beyond our visible universe. In the vast nothingness, there are things that we can still learn through observation. The first step to learning though is by making…
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Wooster Physics returns to Okinawa, Japan!
Greetings Everyone! Last month, I accompanied recent graduate Michael Wolff ’17 to Okinawa, Japan, where Michael presented his senior independent study work as part of an international workshop-style conference for specialists in the field of optical nanofibers. Optical nanofibers are essentially very thin cylindrical glass tubes– so thin, in fact, that their diameters are comparable…
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.