{"id":10050,"date":"2015-05-22T11:09:10","date_gmt":"2015-05-22T15:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10050"},"modified":"2015-05-22T11:09:10","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T15:09:10","slug":"amazing-blackbody-radiation-and-lhc-basics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/05\/22\/amazing-blackbody-radiation-and-lhc-basics\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazing Blackbody Radiation and LHC Basics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was proctoring an exam yesterday in two different sections of the same class, so I had a <em>lot<\/em> of quite time. Which means I wrote not one but two new posts for Forbes&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The first continues a loose series of posts about the exotic physics behind everyday objects (something I&#8217;m toying with as a possible theme for a new book&#8230;), looking at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/chadorzel\/2015\/05\/21\/the-surprisingly-complicated-physics-of-a-light-bulb\/\">the surprisingly complicated physics of an incandescent light bulb<\/a>. A light bulb filament emits (to a reasonable approximation) black-body radiation, which is historically important as the starting point for quantum physics. But when you think about it, it&#8217;s kind of amazing that you get a black-body spectrum from a large collection of atoms that absorb and emit at discrete frequencies&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>(As I type this, I have a crude Monte Carlo simulation running in VPython, so there will be more on this subject later&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>The second post was prompted by the news that the LHC is <a href=\"http:\/\/home.web.cern.ch\/about\/updates\/2015\/05\/first-images-collisions-13-tev\">now colliding protons at 13TeV<\/a>, and offers <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/chadorzel\/2015\/05\/21\/things-to-know-as-the-large-hadron-collider-breaks-energy-records\/\">answers to some really basic questions about the LHC<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So, you know, if you&#8217;d like some physics-y stuff to read as you wait for the official start of the weekend, well, there you go&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was proctoring an exam yesterday in two different sections of the same class, so I had a lot of quite time. Which means I wrote not one but two new posts for Forbes&#8230; The first continues a loose series of posts about the exotic physics behind everyday objects (something I&#8217;m toying with as a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/05\/22\/amazing-blackbody-radiation-and-lhc-basics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Amazing Blackbody Radiation and LHC Basics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[146,19,265,238,7,23,11,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atoms_and_molecules","category-experiment","category-in_the_media","category-optics","category-physics","category-quantum_optics","category-science","category-theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}