Launched just last month, Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, rocky swarms that orbit about 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit. Hal Levison, Lucy’s Principal Investigator, has described Lucy’s complicated trajectory, which includes an Earth gravity-assist and visits to both trojan swarms, as “part science, part art, and part luck”.
Named after the Lucy fossil that elucidates hominid history, Lucy will illuminate solar system history as the trojans are thought to be pristine remnants of planetary formation. The Lucy fossil itself was named after The Beatles‘ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and, indeed, Lucy’s thermal emission spectrometer includes a large diamond beam splitter. During its 12-year primary mission, Lucy will visit seven trojans, including a near-twin binary pair, and one tiny main-belt asteroid named after Donald Johanson, the discover of the Lucy fossil.
Lucy’s trajectory involves an Earth (green) flyby and visits to the trojan asteroids leading and lagging Jupiter (brown) in its orbit. (NASA)
In four dimensions, you can’t tie your shoelaces — because 4D knots don’t work. Any 1D curve in 4D space can be continuously deformed to the unit circle, which is an unknot.
The looping animation below demonstrates how to undo a trefoil knot in 4D, where rainbow colors code the 4th dimension. The animation pauses when curve segments appear to intersect, but the segments’ different colors reveal their separation in the fourth dimension.
2D is too small to allow complicated neural circuits, and 4D is too large to enable knots; perhaps unsurprisingly, we find ourselves in a 3D world.
Unknotting a trefoil knot in 4D, where rainbow colors code the 4th dimension
She’s not looking up at the sky; she’s looking down at it.
I am excitedly following the Inspiration4 spaceflight and its diverse all-private crew of Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Christopher Sembroski, and Hayley Arceneaux. Orbiting higher than any humans this millennium and carrying the largest window ever flown in space, their Crew Dragon Resilience is providing unprecedented and breathtaking views of Earth and stars.
The crew and their personal stories are inspiring, but in addition to advancing human spaceflight, Inspiration4 is raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. The mission also highlights Space Exploration Technologies Corporation at the dawn of a second space age. As Jared radioed seconds before launch, “Punch it, SpaceX”.
Floating in Crew Dragon’s remarkable cupola and orbiting at a near-record altitude, Hayley Arceneaux describes her view of Earth for children of St. Jude, the children’s research hospital that saved her life and for which she now works. (@Inspiration4x/Twitter)
In 1609, Johannes Kepler first described how planets orbit the sun in ellipses. Kepler understood an ellipse as both the locus of points whose distances from two foci sum to a constant and as the intersection of a cone and a plane. But how are these familiar definitions equivalent?
In 1822, Germinal Dandelin discovered a beautiful construction that proves this classic equivalence. The looping animation below pauses periodically to emphasize key aspects of the proof.
A plane intersects a cone in a black ellipse. The red and cyan spheres are tangent to the cone at the parallel circles and tangent to the plane at the ellipses’ focal points. The red lines are equal because they are tangent to the red sphere from the same point; same for the cyan lines. The sum of the cyan and red lines is both the sum of the distances of an ellipse point from the foci and the fixed distance along the cone between the red and cyan tangent circles.
Dandelin spheres illustrate why the intersection of a plane and a cone is the set of points the sum of whose distances from two fixed points is constant.
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 service, including a beautiful discussion of energy conservation, reminding us that the total energy in the universe has been fixed since its creation, although that energy changes forms. The energy that was Teague is now in different forms, but no less real. They also read from a lovely commentary by Aaron Freeman about having a physicist speak at your funeral. These lines really struck me:
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died…. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every BTU of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world…
[You want the physicist to tell your family] that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you.
I know it’s very hard for many of us this Monday, remembering that last Monday, Teague was getting settled on campus and preparing for his senior year. Things can change so quickly.
For me, the best part of my job is the relationships that I develop with the students. It’s a privilege to get to know you all as you grow and change so much from your first year to your fourth, and to keep in touch as you go out from Wooster and change the world in big ways and small. Thank you for the hugs and calls and emails this week — I am so grateful for all the ways that our community draws together to support one another in tough times like these.
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 add them. Graduates schools attended by Wooster Physics graduates since 1990
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 me as I write.
Using Mathematica, Teague numerically integrated the relevant Lagrange equations to simulate the motion of the double pendulum. He then created a two-dimensional initial angles plot of the time for the pendulum to flip as a function of the sub-pendulums’ starting angles, a beautiful high-resolution fractal-like image. I think Teague would have enjoyed the extension below, where I animate the color palette.
Rotating hues code time for a double pendulum to flip for different initial angles; central angles are too small to cause flips. Based on Teague Curless’s final Nonlinear Dynamics project.
Recently at its Boca Chica launch site, SpaceX stacked a Starship on a Superheavy booster to briefly form history’s largest rocket, dwarfing the Apollo Saturn V. Both a fit-check and a statement, SpaceX released the photograph below in black & white, which evokes classic mid-20th century skyscraper construction. But this 21st-century skyscraper is designed to fly to Mars — and be fully reusable.
SpaceX has many challenges to overcome to achieve those goals, but watching them try is tremendously exciting. Not since Apollo has space exploration seen such urgency, boldness, and optimism.
Stacking the world’s largest rocket evokes classic skyscraper construction (Credit: SpaceX)
Fermions like electrons, protons, and neutrons inhabit a 720° world: 360° rotations negate their quantum states, but 720° rotations restore them.
A simple macroscopic model of such spinors is an arrow translating on a Möbius strip: as the center circle rotates, the attached arrow flips after 360° but flips back after 720°.
As the circle rotates, the attached arrow flips after 360° and flips back after 720°
where the ket|\psi\rangle is the state, the exponentials are phase factors, and their arguments are phase shifts.
To detect a relative phase shift, send a neutron via two paths, rotate it along one path with a magnetic field (coupled to its magnetic dipole moment), and observe destructiveinterference for 360° rotations and constructiveinterference for 720° rotations. (The experiment is harder with charged electrons and protons, whose translation is deflected by the magnetic field.)
Marvelously, the square of the sum of natural numbers is the sum of their cubes! Equivalently, the sum of their cubes is the square of their sum. This mathematical gem is attributed to Nicomachus of Gerasa who lived almost 2000 years ago.
For example,
(1+2+3)^2 = 36 = 1^3 +2^3 + 3^3.
More generally,
(1 + 2 + \ldots + n)^2 = 1^3 + 2^3 + \cdots n^3
or
\left( \sum n \right)^2 = \sum n^3.
The accompanying animation illustrates the identity, where the cubes can be rearranged into either a square or a sequence of composite cubes of the same total volume.
Square of the sum is the sum of the cubes
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Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.
Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.