This is true. A guy I knew in graduate school, he had a buddy who was working late in the lab one night. He was all alone, and he got a little bored, so he took a two-liter soda bottle, and he filled it halfway up with liquid nitrogen. Then he screwed the cap on… Continue reading How to Tell a True Lab Story
Author: Chad Orzel
Top Eleven: Henry Cavendish
Next up in the Top Eleven is an experiment whose basic technique is still in use today. Who: Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), a British scientist who made a number of discoveries in physics and chemistry, but received credit for very few of them. When: 1797. What: Cavendish’s modern claim to fame is the torsion pendulum experiment,… Continue reading Top Eleven: Henry Cavendish
A New Life Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies
Some interesting astrophysics news this week, from Nature: scientists have used “microlensing” to discover a extrasolar planet only five times Earth’s mass: Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb looks much more like home. It lies about 390 million kilometres from its star: if it were inside our Solar System, the planet would sit between Mars and Jupiter. It takes… Continue reading A New Life Awaits You in the Off-World Colonies
Top Eleven: Isaac Newton
Third in the Top Eleven is Sir Isaac Newton, who squeaks in with two nominations for two different experiments. Who: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous English physicist, mathematician, alchemist, Master of the Mint, and Neal Stephenson character. When: Newton was secretive and reluctant to publish anything, so it’s sort of hard to assign dates. I’m going… Continue reading Top Eleven: Isaac Newton
Top Eleven: Ole Roemer
The second in the Top Eleven is the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, by Ole Christensen Roemer (whose last name ought to contain an o-with-a-slash-through-it, that I’ve rendered as an “oe”). Who: Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish astronomer. When: The crucial observations were made around 1675. What: Roemer made careful observations of… Continue reading Top Eleven: Ole Roemer
Top Eleven: Galileo Galilei
The first and oldest of the experiments in the Top Eleven is actually a two-fer: Galileo Galilei is nominated both for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and for his experiments on the motion of falling objects. Who: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and general Renaissance man. When: He’s known to… Continue reading Top Eleven: Galileo Galilei
Great Experiments: Top Eleven
Evil elves have apparently snuck into the house in the middle of the night, and stuffed my sinuses with cotton and motor oil (the dog is sitting here muttering “I told you there were evil elves out there but did you listen? ‘Stop barking at nothing,’ you said…” Or maybe that’s the drugs.). This sort… Continue reading Great Experiments: Top Eleven
Physics Face
Thursday night, I needed to work late, so rather than upset the dog by going home for dinner, and then leaving, I went for sushi at a local restaurant. I had a very pleasant meal, which I spent reading through the first few chapters of the textbook I plan to use for my Quantum Optics… Continue reading Physics Face
Great Experiment Round-Up
It’s depressingly typical of my life that we would get BoingBoing-ed on a weekend when I’m visiting the in-laws… I’ve gotten a bunch of responses to my earlier request for “Great Experiments” in other areas of science, and I thought I’d collect the links in one post (many of them show up as TrackBacks to… Continue reading Great Experiment Round-Up
It’s Funny ‘Cause It’s True
We’ve had an outbreak of mathematician jokes in comments, so it seems only fair to offer up a thread for the mockery of physics. Sadly, there really aren’t many good physicist jokes. My personal favorite: A physicist, a chemist, and a biologist get together for a few drinks, and get to talking about life, the… Continue reading It’s Funny ‘Cause It’s True