Physics

"After a year’s delay, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva became the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator on November 30, revving up each of its twin proton beams to energies of 1.18 trillion electron volts. That smashes the record of 0.98 trillion eV held since 2001 by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron in Batavia, Ill." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"Protons and neutrons ("nucleons") are made up of three highly energetic quarks that move around in their tightly confined space with a broad range of different momenta. It was assumed that this momentum distribution would be unaffected by the nuclear environment, since the binding force between the quarks is hundreds of times greater than that between the relatively widely-spaced nucleons. But in 1983, the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) at CERN near Geneva discovered that the quarks in iron nuclei were about 20 percent less likely to be moving with high momentum than quarks inside free nucleons. "It's as if you put an apple in a bucket and it started looking like a pear," says Gerald A. Miller of the University of Washington in Seattle." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. We have 800+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. He has also developed a free, adaptive math program available here. To keep abreast of new videos as we add them, subscribe to the Khan Academy channel on YouTube. The entire video library is shown below. Just click on a category or video title to start learning from the Khan Academy! " - Mike Chelen from Bookmarklet

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!! (Oh come on, someone had to do it.) - Bill Hooker

Bill: haha, if they ever make a self-promotional video, it must include that! - Mike Chelen

"String theorist Michael Green has been announced as the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Green, 63, will succeed Stephen Hawking who held the chair from 1980 before retiring last month at the age of 67 and taking up a distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"The light is first refracted as it enters the surface of the raindrop, reflected off the back of the drop, and again refracted as it leaves the drop. The overall effect is that the incoming light is reflected back over a wide range of angles, with the most intense light at an angle of 40°–42°. The angle is independent of the size of the drop, but does depend on its refractive index. Seawater has a higher refractive index than rain water, so the radius of a 'rainbow' in sea spray is smaller than a true rainbow. This is visible to the naked eye by a misalignment of these bows.[2] The amount by which light is refracted depends upon its wavelength, and hence its colour. Blue light (shorter wavelength) is refracted at a greater angle than red light, but due to the reflection of light rays from the back of the droplet, the blue light emerges from the droplet at a smaller angle to the original incident white light ray than the red light. You may then think it is strange that the pattern of... more... - Mike Chelen

"A theorist publishing in the 21 August Physical Review Letters offers a new explanation for this apparent conflict between the time-symmetry of the physical laws and the forward "arrow of time" we see in everyday events. When viewed in quantum terms, events that increase the entropy of the Universe leave records of themselves in their environment. The researcher proposes that events that go "backward," reducing entropy, cannot leave any trace of having occurred, which is equivalent to not happening." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"I was looking for that transition," she says. "I knew what the colloids looked like in a crystal state, and I knew what they looked like as a liquid, but I didn't know what they looked like in-between. When I finally saw (the transition), I felt like I had won the lottery." - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie) from Bookmarklet

See also his open notebook page: http://openwetware.org/wiki... - Steve Koch

"In June 1948, the Physical Review published a description of a novel electronic device that "may be employed as an amplifier, oscillator, and for other purposes for which vacuum tubes are ordinarily used." That statement hardly begins to capture the importance of the transistor, which made possible technology unimaginable at the time. But the first transistor design never saw commercial success." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"How else could a future quantum engineer build a quantum computer if they can't tell which circuits they have?" - Benjamin Tseng from Bookmarklet

"The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is "wound up" by applying a large magnetic field --no chemistry involved. The device is potentially better than anything found so far, said Barnes." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"Bad news I'm afraid -- it looks as if faster-than-light travel isn't possible after all. That's the conclusion of a new study into how warp drives would behave when quantum mechanics is taken into account. "Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached," say Stefano Finazzi at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and a couple of friends." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"Scientists knew from previous measurements that the Higgs boson must weigh between 114 and 185 GeV/c2–the units that scientists use to measure the mass of particles. The new Fermilab result carves out a section in the middle of this range: the Higgs boson cannot have a mass in between 160 and 170 GeV/c2–if it exists at all." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"The glass is neither half full nor half empty, it is a superposition of a states that is half full and half empty. If you randomly measured the liquid in the glass, half the time you will find that the glass is half full and other half of the time you will find that the glass is half empty" - Imabug from Bookmarklet

Not sure how many optics experimentalists in this room, but you may find this resource from a student in our lab very useful - Steve Koch

"The researchers encoded the letters "S" and "U" (as in Stanford University) within the interference patterns formed by quantum electron waves on the surface of a sliver of copper. The wave patterns even project a tiny hologram of the data, which can be viewed with a powerful microscope" - Imabug from Bookmarklet

Most importantly: this riddle can be solved without any equations. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie) from Bookmarklet

"Plutonium-239 found inside a broken, rusty safe has been shown to be of historic significance: dating from December 1944 it is the very first weapons-grade plutonium refined at the site, or anywhere in the world. The find was made at the Hanford Site, Washington State, which supplied the US nuclear weapon program from its beginnings until the 1980s." - Imabug from Bookmarklet

"Using a combination of theory, simulation, and experiment, they studied the collapse of the air cavity trailing the submerged object, concluding that it ejects water like toothpaste squeezed rapidly from its tube." - Imabug from Bookmarklet