Category: Physics

  • Newton’s Can(n)on

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Ein Stein

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Gossamer Flight

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Variable stars with the Wooster observatory (Jr IS guest blog by Nate Moore)

    Cody Leary

      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…

  • Wooster Physics returns to Okinawa, Japan!

    Cody Leary

    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…

  • Posters on the Hill 2017

    Niklas Manz

    Robin Morillo presented his I.S. research at Posters on the Hill   The Council on Undergraduate Research chose Robin’s poster A Hill on fire: Using matches, 3D printing, and code as a forest fire analog to represent Ohio at the 21st Annual Posters on the Hill on April 26, 2017 in the Rayburn House Office…

  • Expanding Your Horizons – Guest Blog by Michelle Bae

    Susan Lehman

    April is a busy month for STEM majors, starting off with Science Day (pics here!), and ending right before exams. The weekend of April 22 was busy as well, as the College hosted the Wooster community Expanding Your Horizons workshop for fifth and sixth grade girls, run entirely by local women in STEM, including many CoW faculty and students. The…

  • Wooster Physics in Amsterdam, the Netherlands!

    Susan Lehman

    As regular blog readers know, I am currently on a research leave for the year.  A good part of my leave has been spent in Wooster, but I believe it is important to spend a significant time outside of Wooster as well in order to get fresh ideas and perspectives to inform my research and…

  • Engine of Computation

    John F. Lindner

    Chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to the initial conditions and parameters that define them. Minute perturbations of the parameters can even convert chaotic motion to periodic motion. This alliance between control methods and physics — cybernetical physics — opens the door to many applications, including dynamics-based computing. We recently published an article that introduces nonlinear…

  • Thermal exam on the plane

    Niklas Manz

    Robin missed his Thermal exam – because he presented his research on ‘Posters on the Hill’ in Washington, DC. But Wooster offers exceptional experiences as, for example, taking your make-up exam on the plane back from DC to Cleveland.

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