Half-erased blackboards from quantum physics labs
From The Atlantic. The article is from 2012, so a London exhibition of full-size photos is no longer there. But still way cool. The Beautiful Blackboards at Quantum Physics Labs MEGAN GARBER An artist visits the world’s premier quantum mechanics labs. Beauty ensues. “Momentum,” displayed at the Wilmotte Gallery in London (Alejandro Guijarro) Blackboards, the legend […]
Cartoon Laws of Physics
From TheFunnyPages.com: Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes […]
Quantum Invisibility Cloak Hides Objects from Reality
By The Physics arXiv Blog from MITTechnologyReview.com: Physicists have worked out how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself. Invisibility cloaks are all the rage these days. Over the last few years, this blog has followed various attempts to develop invisibility cloaks for earthquakes, acoustics and […]
Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars
From SmithsonianMag.com: Image: Loring Loding Have you ever noticed that almost every barn you have ever seen is red? There’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the chemistry of dying stars. Seriously. Yonatan Zunger is a Google employee who decided to explain this phenomenon on Google+ recently. The simple answer to […]
Physics, Entropy and Web Design
A long, interesting article by Anthony Wing Kosner from Forbes.com. Excerpts are below. [Full article] We have been taught to think of entropy as a bad thing. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats in the aftermath of World War I, in words that still ring […]
Physicists at CERN caught ‘colliding’ household objects
Inspectors examining a recent malfunction at the Large Hadron Collider found that senior scientists had been “inserting various household objects into the collider,” causing helium leakage and misalignment of several of the magnets. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, cost over 4.1 billion dollars to build, runs a length of 27 kilometers below Geneva and has […]