Category: Wooster

  • Wooster’s Time Crystals

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • A Century of Compton Scattering

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Wooster Physics Alumni at Kent Displays

    Susan Lehman

    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!

  • Compton Generator

    John F. Lindner

    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”,…

  • 50 years later

    Niklas Manz

    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…

  • Thinking of Teague

    Susan Lehman

    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…

  • Grad Schools

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • For Teague

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Transition

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Geographic Tongue

    John F. Lindner

    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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