tingilinde

two physicists confronted with the end

Enrico Fermi and John von Neumann had very different reactions when they learned they would die of cancer. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar knew both and was asked to comment in an interview:

 

 

 

the liverpool atom smasher

A history of the University of Liverpool's synchrocyclotron - the last big particle physics machine in the UK.  There's a great section on a heated discussion of the magnet's polarity.

It takes a society with a good deal of optimism about the future to build such devices ..  particularly when they're rebuilding.

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Funding for the new accelerator was granted to the university in 1946 in acknowledgment of the work that Chadwick and other Liverpool physicists did on the Manhattan project. “When you look and see the deprivation after the war, this machine had priority money from the government, so it’s clear how important it was,” says Mike Houlden, a retired physicist from the university who first studied there during the final years of the accelerator’s operation. The synchrocyclotron itself cost £500,000, and the building that housed it is listed as having cost £235,000 – a considerable investment in a country heavily hit during the war. Taking inflation into account, the synchrocyclotron would have cost the equivalent of almost £28.5m today.

“The country was still recovering from the war, so it was amazing that the government had prioritized building a particle accelerator in 1947 and 1948,” Houlden adds, pointing out an image of the Liverpool skyline at the time of the accelerator’s construction in 1951 that shows cranes in the city still repairing damage from German bombing.

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szilard

This talk may be interesting if you know anything about him - otherwise it may be a bit scattered.  One of the more unusual characters in physics.

oppenheimer bios

Ash Jogalekar discusses four Oppenheimer bios.  I've read the first two and agree with him.  The last one sound like one I need to read.

 

d'arcy thompson

A piece on a very interesting biology - one of the first to apply mathematics to biology and an interesting teacher. (audio and transcript).  It's part of the Genetics Society Podcast series - which looks potentially fascinating.

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And it was part of that process that, of course, is still very controversial today of trying to, on the one hand, balance fish stocks in the ocean and on the other, the livelihoods of fishermen. And so he was involved in a lot of international negotiations on fishery rights and so on. And so that's really the work that at the time he would have been best known for, but we've kind of forgotten that side of it because of this extraordinary legacy of this amazing book that he wrote called On Growth And Form.

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A bit of the hat to Lev

 

 

 

on spin - about 100 years ago

A nice piece on one of the most important experiments during the birth of quantum mechanics - the Stern-Gerlach experiment.  The title is a bit misleading though. 

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Schmidt-Böcking—a semi-retired experimentalist at Goethe University Frankfurt and arguably the world’s foremost expert on Stern’s life and work—is the best guide I could have hoped for. We walk around the block from the station, past the Senckenberg Natural History Museum Frankfurt, to the Physikalischer Verein, the local physicists’ society, which predates Goethe University Frankfurt’s 1914 founding. In this building, in the wee hours of February 8, 1922, Stern and Gerlach shot a beam of silver atoms through a magnetic field and saw that the beam neatly split into two.

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the noise of krakatoa

A piece on the remarkable pressure wave from the Krakatoa eruption in 1883.

Of course there was Mt Tambora, but that was 1815 when instrumentation was much cruder.

 

a thought for the day - 412 years

 

The secondary mirror on the JWST has successfully deployed, so technically it's a telescope.  

 

 

 

newton's birthday

 

 

It's also fitting that the JWST launched on his birthday as he invented the reflector telescope.

 

an update on the antikythera mechanism

This device continues to amaze.  

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Much of the mechanism’s design relies on wisdom from earlier Middle Eastern scientists. Astronomy in particular went through a transformation during the first millennium B.C.E. in Babylon and Uruk (both in modern-day Iraq). The Babylonians recorded the daily positions of the astronomical bodies on clay tablets, which revealed that the sun, moon and planets moved in repeating cycles—a fact that was critical for making predictions. The moon, for instance, goes through 254 cycles against the backdrop of the stars every 19 years—an example of a so-called period relation. The Antikythera mechanism’s design uses several of the Babylonian period relations.

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