In April 1986, Las Vegas' MGM Grand hotel & casino hosted 4,000 physicists for a conference...and had the worst financial week in its history. We've been effectively banned ever since. The full story:
Today we honor Maria Goeppert Mayer, who is the second woman to win a Nobel prize in physics for her proposal of nuclear shells. Mayer endured many years of unpaid and unofficial work at labs but persevered to become a prominent figure in theoretical physics.
This INCREDIBLE GIF is from
@Jezzamonn
's explainer of Fourier transforms. It's rare someone makes it so engaging, easy, and FUN to master a complicated concept like this! Check it out:
THREAD: Today is Nikola Tesla's birthday! We're taking a minute to toast the high deity of modern science-nerd culture...but we'd do him a disservice to celebrate his genius without remembering his tenacity, and what his story meant in the larger struggle he was a part of. (1/13)
In 1978, Anatoli Bugorski accidentally stuck his HEAD into the beam of a 67 GeV particle accelerator. For reference, that's more than 250x the energy we use when we want to treat cancer with particle radiation. As his face began to swell, he was taken to the hospital... 1/
If 3/14 is "Pi Day", that makes today "e day" — 2/7/18! We're celebrating by reading up on Euler's number and reflecting on the strangeness of the transcendental numbers that arise when we try and quantify a curvy universe:
If you could hold an electron up to a mirror, you'd see that your reflection is holding up the particle's antimatter counterpart: a positron. Does this point to a deeper insight on the true nature of electric charge? Read part 2 of "Waves & Whirlpools"!
The "Schwarzschild radius" of a black hole defines the spherical area that even light can't escape from. It was named for German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild—the first to solve Einstein's field equations—but curiously enough, "Schwarzschild" translates to "black shield"!
You can't visualize a ten-sphere, but that doesn't mean you can't think visually about it!
@3Blue1Brown
continues to amaze me—a magnificent video on thinking in higher-dimensional spaces. Best 20 minutes you'll spend online all day:
Unbelievable. Zoom in close and you can see a single atom of strontium in this photo, winner of the
@EPSRC
2018 photo contest. This was taken with a digital camera on long-exposure.
Using sound waves and a super cold gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate, scientists create an analogue to a black hole, and find evidence of Hawking Radiation in it. via
@LiveScience
Not ashamed to say I gained a fuller understanding of the Fourier transform from this 20-minute video than I did from my undergrad physics profs;
@3Blue1Brown
is one of the best communicators on the internet. It's more than educational, it's awe-inspiring!
Spacetime is generally thought to be perfectly smooth and curved, but what if it isn't? Like a small grain of sand flowing across a dune field, spacetime could be a fluid full of tiny grains.
#PhysicsBuzz
🐝
Today we honor Hedy Lamarr, who was a Hollywood star and the inventor of an early version of the frequency-hopping spread spectrum (needed for the creation of WIFI and GPS). Lamarr showed that a woman could be glamours, but most of all a woman could be brilliant.
An awful lot of hype is building up around a technology called Plasma Wakefield Acceleration—and with good reason: if it lives up to its promise, it'll mean particle accelerators more powerful than the LHC, at a fraction of the size & cost:
At Physics Central we are proud to join
@APSPhysics
in celebrating
#LGBTSTEMDay
. Regardless of your sexual orientation or gender identity, you belong in physics, and we’re thrilled to have you. To celebrate, we’ll be sharing the experiences of LGBTQ+ scientists.
Another awesomely simple circular motion demo, this time showing that when the centripetal force is removed the object follows a tangent to the circle.
Src: YouTube/ISLE Physics
HUGE if true—scientists in India report superconductivity at record-high temperatures. If this can be reproduced, it's a giant leap toward room-temperature superconductors. Read the preprint:
This INCREDIBLE GIF is from
@Jezzamonn
's explainer of Fourier transforms. It's rare someone makes it so engaging, easy, and FUN to master a complicated concept like this! Check it out:
Its international joke day. We apologize in advance for the following:
What do you call a caffeinated beverage thats both hot and cold at the same time?
A quanti-tea.
Today we honor and celebrate Emmy Noether, who is known for Noether’s Theorem, which has tremendous effects on theoretical physics. Happy 138th Birthday Noether!
At age 22, Stephen Hawking was told he had two years to live. On what most would consider borrowed time, he wrangled an unruly universe, & inspired millions to believe that we can understand the mysteries of this strange and wonderful spacetime we're a part of. He will be missed.
So our "Ask a Physicist" inbox gets a truly hysterical number of inquiries from people who appear to think it's "Ask a Psychic". There are literally hundreds of these, so expect this to become a regular feature...&& dream big, Chastity. I believe in you.
[Image of Ludwig Boltzmann accompanied by quote: "It must be splendid to command millions of people in great national ventures, to lead a hundred thousand to victory in battle. But it seems to me greater still to discover fundamental truths in a very modest room, with..."] (1/2)
BREAKING: For the first time, scientists have identified the source of an astrophysical neutrino—a highly elusive subatomic particle moving with incredible energy—which appears to have come from the black hole at the core of a distant galaxy:
The particle shown below is being moved through this maze...just using sound! How does this happen?
In this thread, we’re going to take a closer look. (1/9)
The size of a diamond may reveal changes in the universe's fundamental constants, and show the existence of dark matter 😮 .
Here's the
#PhysicsBuzz
🐝 , coming at ya.
Today we honor Desiré Whitmore
@DarthScience
, who is a senior physics educator at the San Fransisco Exploratorium. She helps science teachers create engaging and hands-on lessons.
#blackhistorymonth
Expectation:
@Fermilab
literally turned into thousands of floating bubbles.
Reality: In 1969 Fermilab built a particle accelerator that would leave trails of bubbles as particles sped past.
Still cool still cool.
via
@ScienceNews
Day is here!
#WorldQuantumDay
join us in celebrating the wonderful world of Quantum Science and Technologies. Find activities or read an article or better yet an experiment! Here we share a fun article by
@Brownianaweb
on a mystery solved 🕵️♀️ 🔍
From topology to nuclear fusion, donuts are the physicist's breakfast pastry of choice—not just because they’re tasty, but because their shape, the torus, is the subject of fascinating physics! Let's dig in:
@dunkindonuts
@krispykreme
@TimHortonsUS
Its
#InternationalCatDay
.
Here's some pawsome facts that show the close relationship between felines and physics:
1. According to a recent study, cats understand basic laws of physics, and are surprised when objects appear to defy those laws.
It sounds like a supervillain's origin story, but Bugorski went on to have a respectable career in experimental physics. For those curious, he described the experience as painless, but "brighter than a thousand suns". 4/4
Read the full story at
@Gizmodo
:
The proton/electron mass ratio is, to a decent approximation, 6π^5.
Numerical coincidences happen all the time, (think "golden spiral" memes) but I sometimes actually lose sleep over this one, bc it looks like someone took the first derivative of π^6.
Using adaptive optics—the same tech that lets
#astronomers
take the twinkle out of starlight—scientists have captured the first HD footage of a live immune cell moving around in its natural habitat.