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Wooster’s Time Crystals
Saturday, March 8, 2008. A heavy snow, one of the heaviest I remember, shuts down the city of Wooster. Streets are undriveable, so I walk to Taylor Hall, getting snow in my boots. Taylor is deserted, as the College has begun Spring Break, but like yesterday, Kelly and I work all afternoon and evening in…
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A Century of Compton Scattering
One hundred years ago today the Physical Review published research on light scattering electrons that would earn its author, Wooster graduate Arthur Compton, a Physics Nobel Prize. By relativistically conserving spacetime momentum, as in the diagram below, and treating light as particles now called photons, Compton discovered that deflecting an electron through an angle stretches…
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Wooster Physics Alumni at Kent Displays
Three Wooster physics alumni who all work at Kent Displays, Inc. returned to campus last Thursday to share some info about the physics of liquid crystals as well as some of their personal journeys to Wooster and beyond. See more information over at the NEWS page on the Wooster Physics website!
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Compton Generator
Long before he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and while still a Wooster undergraduate, Arthur Compton realized a third way to demonstrate Earth’s spin (after pendulums and gyroscopes). Compton reported his results in a manuscript submitted to the journal Science on 1913 January 13 and published as “A Laboratory Method of Demonstrating the Earth’s Rotation”,…
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50 years later
After MANY months of not traveling, I scheduled a meeting with Robert (Bob) M. Mazo, Professor emeritus from the University of Oregon, now living outside Philadelphia. In 1971/1972 he helped developing the key model to describe chemical reaction-diffusion systems. But, as he stated, he was “only the catalyst” and only accepted to be recognized in…
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Thinking of Teague
Yesterday, Dr Manz and I went to Lexington, Kentucky to attend the memorial service for Teague Curless. It was good to gather with Teague’s friends and family so that we could talk about him and remember him, and share our aching hearts with each other. Teague’s family incorporated a lot of physics into the memorial…
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Grad Schools
Wooster physics graduates do many things after Wooster, including graduate work. Below is a map of some of the graduate schools they have attended, one dimension of the influence of our department. If you are a recent Wooster physics graduate and don’t see your graduate schools on the map, please contact us, and we will…
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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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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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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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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.