Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
It’s been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there’s a good bunch of stuff on this list: — How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I’m trying to figure out […]
This one was a whole bunch of work for one smallish shot… So, in past rounds of “science-y things with my fancy camera,” I looked at the effect of ISO settings and apertures. This time out, I wanted to look at something moving, and the way that it blurs with increasing exposure time. My initial […]
A little while back, I did a comparison of the different ISO settings on my camera, and a bunch of people commented that it would be interesting to try to match two photos at different levels. So, here’s that: These aren’t quite perfectly matched, because the time settings give me a limited range of options, […]
It’s a grey, dismal, rainy day here at Chateau Steelypips, and I’m a little groggy from cold medication. Which means it’s not a great writing day, but it is a good day to stay inside and do a little SCIENCE! for the photo of the day. thus, this: This is a small assortment of toys […]
I love a lot of things about our neighborhood, which is all pleasant tree-lined streets and stuff, but it’s not a great place for taking pictures of sunset– I pretty much need to get in the car to get to a place with a clear view of the western horizon. This knocks out a big […]
For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here’s a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something: OK, this needs some explanation… So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either […]
It’s rained fairly steadily for the last couple of days, which is to be expected. This also sent me to the back yard in hopes of getting a very particular effect for the photo of the day, that I had seen on a poster from the APS’s student photo contest a few years ago: Here […]
I’ve been doing a lot of opining on my blogs of late, and much less science-ing that I would like. So I thought I’d try bringing a little science to the photo-a-day project, by playing around with f-numbers. I put the camera on the tripod, with my fastest lens (a 50mm f/1.8 prime) and set […]
Last week, I did a post for Forbes on the surprisingly complicated physics of a light bulb. Incandescent light bulbs produce a spectrum that’s basically blackbody radiation, but if you think about it, that’s kind of amazing given that the atoms making up the filament have quantized states, and can absorb and emit only discrete […]
I was proctoring an exam yesterday in two different sections of the same class, so I had a lot of quite time. Which means I wrote not one but two new posts for Forbes… The first continues a loose series of posts about the exotic physics behind everyday objects (something I’m toying with as a […]