Kicking Erwin Schrödinger out of my idols. Not because he chose a cat for his thought experiment, but because of one thing I learnt: he sexually abused children and kept a diary about it. 🤮 Src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Sexual_abuse
A little classical mechanics problem you can solve without doing any calculation:
Consider the hyper-simplified problem of a bell-shaped hill, and a point rock that can slide without friction up and down the hill. If you start with the rock at the bottom, and give it exactly the kinetic energy needed to arrive to the top and stop there without sliding on the other side, how long will it take to arrive there? #Physics#ITeachPhysics
I am gradually writing an explainer of the great error they are making in the #quantum#physics community, by believing that John Bell’s arguments are logically sound. The arguments are thoroughly fallacious.
When a particle decays and spits off some alpha radiation why doesnt it take with it some of the electrons from its parent particle? I would expect the electrons to "stick" to the helium nucleus and travel with it.
I am guessing it is a matter of moment. The alpha particle flys off at such speed the resting moment of the electrons may make it so they cant follow it... but considering that electrons arent at "rest" and that they have very very little mass I question myself on this answer.
I'm debating with myself whether to write it in Python, and so pretend it's best to use a language physicists know, or Ada, and thus a language that doesn't suck and which everyone can read. Then also I can recommend translation to Python as an exercise for the reader who actually cares. (I, after all, came up with such stuff by translating from a mere sketchy description of a program that I think was in Scilab.)
After some modification to the amplifier, the oscillation has been suppressed enough. The dipole had to be shortened 15% or so due to the proximity to ground and buildings but no matter, the system works.
We got immediate spots in Great Britain on our first transmission cycle - in broad daylight @ 40m using our club call sign.
The dipole has a metal facade directly to the east, which might explain the directionality of the spots #physics
Scientists have produced an oxide glass with unprecedented toughness. Under high pressures and temperatures, they succeeded in paracrystallizing an aluminosilicate glass: The resulting crystal-like structures cause the glass to withstand very high stresses and are retained under ambient conditions.
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity.
Interesting fact of the day: Not counting point sources of light, any source of light that doesnt appear as a single point will have the same brightness no matter what distance you happen to be from it.
In fact the opposite is true in a sense. Once you get close enough to an object that you can no longer see the whole object within your field of view, then it will get less bright as you get closer.
Amazingly this even applies to the sun. IF you were at the surface of the sun, just a few feet away (Such that 1 meter square of the surface of the sun was within your field of vision) it would only appear to be 93 lumens bright. That would be equivalent to only a 6 watt incandescent light bulb! Compare that to the brightness of the sun from earth which is a whopping 127,000 lumens.
#Cats exist in a quantum superposition of two states: "pet me" and "how dare you touch me you hairless ape". It is only by touching them that their wave function collapses to one of these states.
A spherical shell-like structure 1 billion light-years in diameter named Ho’oleilana is discovered in the distribution of relatively nearby galaxies. We posit this is the 1st observation of an individual Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO).
Haven't seen much discussion on the recent room-temperature superconductivity claims here on Mastodon (am I following the wrong people?), but before the hype hits you, here is the current state of affairs:
One numerical result shows that the suggested material should have flat eletron bands, which are consistent with (but do not prove) superconductivity (https://t.co/2m0ojMOTLr).
Until we have independent experimental replication, any hype is premature.
There are many situations in the real world where small initial differences can easily grow into very large differences just out of pure chance.
Since we are on a social network, let's create a toy model* where a number of posts all have the same probability to be reposted/shared/boosted by any person seeing them. Since the more people see a post, the more people have a chance of boosting it, the posts with more visibility are also the ones that are likely to gain more visibility. So small initial fluctuations (just one or two extra boosts at the beginning) can lead a post to skyrocket in popularity, even though it is not intrinsically "better" than any of the other.
If we simulate this process numerically and make a histogram of the result, we see that the distribution of how many boosts a post had rapidly grows a tail, with most posts having no visibility whatsoever, and a few having a LOT more than the average. #ITeachPhysics#ProbabilityTheory#ToyModel
In the #Physics jargon, a "toy model" is a very simple (often unrealistic) model, which nevertheless capture the essence of the problem, without being burdened by all the real world complications. If you ever heard about spherical cows in vacuum, that is a toy model!
I do not expect this simulation to change many minds. The Bohr cult is a cult. When it comes to quantum mechanics, supposed scientists are not scientists at all, but authoritarian cultists.
However, the truly interested may want to take a look at the program. It’s my best yet, for sure.
This version does NOT ‘swap channels’, as have my earlier versions, and therefore is unobjectionable in that regard.
(Channel-swapping is mathematically equivalent, ‘in the limit as n->infinity’. Nonetheless it did not give strictly correct statistics for the simulation. It gave merely a less accurate approximation.)
Just made this (as a variation on an old animation) for a talk, so why not show it here?
(hand-coded) finite element simulation of a pulse hitting a disordered medium and being scattered around. #PhysicsFactlet#ITeachPhysics#Physics#Optics
"A brief history of time" by Stephen Hawking is probably the most influential semi-popular #science book ever written in #physics, #astrophysics, #cosmology , one that brought generations of students into these fields.
Do you know of any equivalent books in other fields of science, STEM or other ? Reply ⬇️
Boosting will make everybody on #Mastodon smarter !
Austrian Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She was the first to pinpoint the atomic phenomenon now known as the Auger effect, but it was credited to Pierre Auger who independently discovered it months after her. Years later when she made a breakthrough in identifying and understanding nuclear fission, her findings were published only under the name of her collaborator, Otto Hahn, who later also received the Nobel Prize for this discovery. via @IAEA
Scientists Invent New Glass With Supreme Toughness (scitechdaily.com)
Scientists have produced an oxide glass with unprecedented toughness. Under high pressures and temperatures, they succeeded in paracrystallizing an aluminosilicate glass: The resulting crystal-like structures cause the glass to withstand very high stresses and are retained under ambient conditions.
Bicycle (ciechanow.ski)
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity.
Grab a teaspoon of neutron star core. Teleport it into Earth's atmosphere. What would happen?
I believe the density chances quickly to match Earth's pressure....
Astrophysicist believes he's cracked the code for time travel (www.earth.com)
After years of research, Professor Mallett claims to have finally developed the revolutionary equation for time travel.