Albert Einstein and Marie Curie conversing in Geneva, July 1924.
Marie met Einstein personally in 1911, during the first Solvay Conference in Brussels. Einstein confirmed this fact in one of his letters:
"I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels(…)"
Credits: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Held by Niels Bohr Library & Archives
Michael Faraday was born #OTD in 1791. English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. As a chemist, he discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers. via @wikipedia
French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer using the centigrade scale with 0 representing the melting point of water and 100 its boiling point.
Available at : Annales des sciences physiques et naturelles, d'agriculture et d'industrie
By Société d'agriculture, sciences et industrie de Lyon. via @googlebooks
English electrical engineer and physicist John Ambrose Fleming died #OTD in 1945.
He is best known for his invention of the vacuum tube diode, which he patented in 1904. The vacuum tube diode, also known as the Fleming valve, was the first practical vacuum tube and allowed for the detection & amplification of electrical signals. It was a crucial component in early radio receivers and telecommunications systems, laying the foundation for the development of modern electronics.
German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen died #OTD in 1923.
Nobel Prize in Physics won for his discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him. In November 8, 1895, he found that, if the discharge tube is enclosed in a sealed, thick black carton to exclude all light, and if he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium platinocyanide placed in the path of the rays became fluorescent even when it was as far as two metres from the discharge tube.
Having a basic understanding of #physics and a passing interest in the #industrial revolution has its uses, even in 2023.
I wanted to clean my patio furniture as steam is good for that so I dug out my old Vax steam cleaning gun which I'd last used about 7 years ago. It initially worked, but then seemed to stop.
I let it cool and emptied the (still mostly full) tank. A lot of limescale. Refilled, still seemed blocked. Emptied again, shook, refilled, reheated, still blocked. Sigh.
Born #onthisday in 1835, Josef Stefan was an ethnic Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire [1].
During his lifetime Stefan published nearly 80 scientific articles, most appearing in the Bulletins of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.
Stefan is perhaps best known for his study of blackbody radiation [2] and for discovering what we now call Stefan's law, a physical power law which states that the total radiation from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its (thermodynamic) temperature. Stefan's law was later extended to grey bodies by one of Stefan's students, Ludwig Boltzmann [3], and is now known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law [4].
That last one has puzzled me for decades, I mean why is there anything at all?
I have only read the preface and first two chapters but am very much enjoying "On the Origin of Time" which is about Stephen Hawking's final theory, by his long time collaborator Thomas Hertog.
It is a joy to read, easily understood (so far) while dealing with the limits of human understanding.
Is there the usual ambulance-chasing deluge of theoretical papers on ArXiv trying to "explain" the latest high-Tc superconductor claims? If not, what is different this time? 🤔 #Physics#SaturdayAfternoonMusing@academicchatter
Looking back over my amateur career in non-loco #physics , I think I am now likely the first person to fully realize an obvious fact.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen are right simply because an EPR experiment—ANY variation one can possibly dream up—can be described at all!
If an EPR experiment can be described, it can be translated into an equivalent signal processing problem. The signal processing problem will be classical. Therefore the EPR experiment is classical. QED.
If you are a #Physics student/PhD/etc in a less privileged country, would a fully online "summer" school with no fees for attendees be useful to you?
(Just ruminating ideas so far, nothing concrete yet. But feedback and ideas are more than welcome.) #ITeachPhysics
In 1924, Schottky co-invented the ribbon microphone along with Erwin Gerlach. The idea was that a very fine ribbon suspended in a magnetic field could generate electric signals. This led to the invention of the ribbon loudspeaker by using it in the reverse order, but it was not practical until high flux permanent magnets became available in the late 1930s. via @wikipedia
And we are having another go at overnight operations of our student built #wspr#hamradio beacon callsign DL0WH - this time with an improvised antenna tuner adjusted for maximum field strength in the near field using #tinySA. First few transmission cycles are already looking pretty good. #electronics#physics#education
Bizarre 'demon' particle found inside superconductor could help unlock a 'holy grail' of physics (www.space.com)
The transparent, chargeless quasiparticle could shed more light on the underlying mechanics of superconductivity