Today’s equation in our march to Newton’s birthday is actually a tiny bit out of order, historically speaking: This is the Rydberg formula for the wavelengths of the spectral lines in hydrogen (and hydrogen-like ions), with R a constant having the appropriate units, and the two n‘s being two dimensionless integers. This equation was developed […]
Month: December 2011
Links for 2011-12-21
Molly Grades the Charts: The Top Ten of 2011 – Hollywood Prospectus Blog A Grantlad writer’s personal top ten songs out of Billboard’s top 100 for the year. Notable primarily because I only recognize one of the ten songs. Our favourite pictures of 2011 – physicsworld.com Much as we enjoy reporting the complex and intriguing […]
Experiment vs. Theory: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Over at Backreaction, Bee is running an advent calendar of her own, with amusing anecdotes about famous physicists. Apparently, it’s a good year for advent calendars. A couple of days ago, her story was a famous one about Heisenberg nearly failing to get his Ph.D. because he disdained experiment: Wien wanted to fail Heisenberg, but […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Einstein’s Nobel
Yesterday’s equation was the first real result of quantum theory, Max Planck’s formula for the black-body spectrum. Planck never really liked the quantum basis of it, though, and preferred to think of it as just a calculational trick. It wasn’t until 1905 that anybody took the idea really seriously, leading to today’s equation: From the […]
Links for 2011-12-20
Charles P. Pierce on the religion of Tim Tebow – Grantland If we’re going to have a real discussion about the place of public religion in our public spectacles, then let’s have one instead of some mushy, Wonder Bread platitudes about how great it is that Tim Tebow talks about Jesus and doesn’t get caught […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Science Works
Moving along in our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we come to 1900, and one of the most revolutionary moment in the history of physics, represented in today’s equation: This is Max Planck’s formula for the spectrum of the “black-body” radiation emitted by a hot object at temperature T. It’s also the equation highlighted on what […]
Links for 2011-12-19
Fun games for science-y kids. | Doing Good Science, Scientific American Blog Network Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games, in general, tend to be brain-friendly giftables. It’s worth noting […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Entropy
As I said yesterday, I’m going to blow through another entire subfield of physics in a single equation, as our march toward Newton’s Birthday continues. Today, it’s statistical mechanics, a very rich field of study that we’re boiling down to a single equation: This is Boltzmann’s formula for the entropy of a macroscopic system of […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Ideal Gas
Once again, the advent calendar is delayed until late at night by a busy day with SteelyKid– soccer in the morning, playing with a trebuchet after lunch, then Arthur Christmas at the Colonie mall. We’re running low on days to honor great milestones in physics, though, so I don’t want to skip a day entirely. […]
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Ampère and Maxwell
To end this week, we wrap up electricity and magnetism with the fourth and final of Maxwell’s equations. this one includes Maxwell’s own personal contribution to these: This is sort of the mirror image of Faraday’s Law from yesterday, with the curl of the magnetic field on the left, and stuff related to a change […]