Since the introduction of open lectures by progressive thinking educational institutions like M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, Yale, and others, many exceptional presentations have bubbled to the top and should be watched.
I listened to about a quarter of all the lectures from this course—most of which were over my head, but the first and second (mp3) classes are fascinating and make me wish I studied biology at school.
Warning: The following link leads to an extremely addicting flash game. Luckily there are only 20 levels and then you can go to sleep. At least, that’s what I did.
The following photos are from a set taken with a Pentax k10d from a high-altitude sounding balloon during an experiment conducted by Oklahoma State University while testing a new cosmic radiation detector.
According to the original poster, the k10d performed flawlessly in the harsh vacuum of space at temperatures below -60F.
“The payloads are attached to a sounding balloon which climbs to over 100,000 ft. The balloon is tracked with GPS telemetry systems. When the balloon is launched, it is about 12 ft. in diameter. At peak altitude it is between 40-50 ft. in diameter before burst (or commanded cut-down).”
Check out Cosmic Variance’s list of possible discoveries and the probability of each discovery being made in the next five years at the Large Hadron Collider.
Last fall Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk interviewed Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor of both computer science and electrical engineering.
Levoy shows them leading edge research about automatically stitching images together, digitizing real world three dimensial objects like statues, and among others, camera technology that allows you to refocus the image AFTER you shoot it! (Multi-array imaging)
“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyor). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyor moves in the opposite direction. This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
Personally, my first thought was that the plane would not take off because it wouldn’t have enough lift without moving up to speed relative to the ground. But after thinking about what it is that actually causes a plane to lift off, the wind going around the wings, I wasn’t so sure.
The wheels in planes aren’t generally what cause the plane to move forward, it’s the suction of wind through the propeller or engines. Presumably the plane would pull the same amount of wind whether or not it was riding the conveyor belt, therefore, I think it would take off.
While you’re taking a moment to think about this problem, let me tell you that tonight the Mythbuster’s are putting this question to rest once and for all. Will a plane on a conveyor belt take-off? (We’ll see tonight, but I think yes).
The latest iteration of the world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, will be switched on in May 2008 (though the BBC documentary below says November, the time line has been updated).
It’s big, REALLY big, and expensive—costing over 6 billion dollars and crossing between the borders of France and Switzerland at four points. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories.
As a side note, CERN has had some impressive byproducts, including the web itself.
The BBC created a great documentary about it called The Six Billion Dollar Experiment. Enjoy.
Better than the light traveling through time experiment, is Tom Van Baak’s experiment in which he outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain road trip, compared with readings on clocks left back at home. Time travel in action.
As a collector of vintage and modern atomic clocks, I discovered it was possible, using gear found at home, to convert our family minivan into a mobile high-precision time laboratory, complete with batteries, power converters, time interval counters, three children, and three cesium clocks. We drove as high as we could up Mount Rainier, the volcano near Seattle, Washington, and parked there for two days. The trip was continuously logged with the global positioning system; the net altitude gain was +1340 meters.
Given the terrestrial blueshift of 1.1 × 10-16 per meter mentioned by Kleppner and integrating our altitude profile, we predicted the round-trip time dilation to be +22 nanoseconds. This is remarkably close to what we experimentally observed when, after we returned, the ensemble of portable cesium clocks was again compared with atomic clocks left at home.
Back in 2000 Scientists figured out a way to make a pulse of light travel faster than the speed of light. Wait until you hear exactly what they did; it might have been a few years ago but it will still blow your mind.
Scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J did an experiment which caused a pulse of light, a group of waves with no mass, to come out the other side of a specially prepared chamber before it was even done entering.
Inside a chamber, they changed the state of a vapour in a way that light travelling through it would travel faster than normal.
When the pulse of light travelled through the vapour, the pulse reconfigured as some component waves stretched and others compressed. As the waves approached the end of the chamber, they recombined, forming the original pulse.
The key to the experiment was that the pulse reformed before it could have gotten there by simply travelling through empty space. This means that, when the waves of the light distorted, the pulse traveled forward in time.
I’m not sure that it means anything in the grand scheme of things because they say they don’t know of any way to turn this phenomena into a way to carry data. But if they ever do figure it out, say hello to Internet III.
On Saturday and Sunday we, the human population, had an opportunity to see the moon completed blotted out by Earth’s shadow in one of those rare events known as a Lunar eclipse. Personally I’ve always thought solar eclipses to be the more interesting variety and so I never even bothered looking for the moon over the weekend.
However, thanks to the power of the modern computing, below is an animated version of the entire phenomena, for those like myself that want all the reward without any of the effort. I have to admit, the orange glow that appears on the moon during the middle of the action is kind of cool.
Malcolm Gladwell’s father recently installed a geothermal heating and cooling system in his backyard. After reading his father’s explanation on the benefits of geothermal temperature control, I will definitely consider this option when it comes time to build my dream home.
“[N]ot only was the house warm but the difference in the quality of the air inside the marked. Oil heat works through combustion: it uses up oxygen. Geothermal systems heat the house with ambient air, which makes you feel like you are outside when you are inside. This summer, southern Ontario—where my parents live—has had the same heatwave as the rest of us in the Northeast, and now my parent’s house has been as wonderfully cool as it was warm in the winter.”
This is a bit of old news, but it’s interesting.
