Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks: — I’m apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan’s Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen’s The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night. The Springsteen stuff is… Continue reading Pop Culture Notes
Author: Chad Orzel
Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment
Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go:… Continue reading Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment
Links for 2010-11-19
Physics Buzz: It’ll make you laugh; it’ll make you cry. It’s…Science!!! A friend once told me that she never watches the Discovery Channel because she feels some sort of obligation to pay attention and retain the information being presented. I can see where she’s coming from; science can be intimidating. But my message is simple:… Continue reading Links for 2010-11-19
Thursday Toddler Blogging 111810
Fashion’s been on our minds this week, what with the whole Rock Stars of Science thing rolling out yesterday, so this week we have SteelyKid modeling the latest in toddler headgear: This was the culmination of a game that started with her putting her napkin on her head, and declaring it a hat. We moved… Continue reading Thursday Toddler Blogging 111810
Poll: Significant Figures
I’m grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don’t have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks: You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software While the class in question uses some quantum ideas,… Continue reading Poll: Significant Figures
Links for 2010-11-18
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Mini-Me “Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil’s sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines (“the Diet Coke of evil”), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds — a… Continue reading Links for 2010-11-18
Trapped Antihydrogen
The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This seems like… Continue reading Trapped Antihydrogen
Rock Stars of Science
So, if you look at this picture: You might be asking yourself “Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?” But no, this isn’t a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it’s part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by… Continue reading Rock Stars of Science
Links for 2010-11-17
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Business or Town? “Tenured Radical’s thoughtful post on elite presidential salaries got me thinking about the “run the college like a business” canard. Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven’t personally worked in a college that was actually a business. I have —… Continue reading Links for 2010-11-17
The Diagonal Parking Theorem
(With apologies to Georg Cantor) Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park. Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space. Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding… Continue reading The Diagonal Parking Theorem