Physicist

Latest news on physicist

Hawaiian anti-LHC lawsuit thrown out

Beak bins botanist's bid to bust boson-botherers Famous eccentric American botanist, lawyer and soi-disant physicist Walter L Wagner has failed in his bid to have the US courts close down the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Hawaiian federal judges reportedly felt that the enormous 27-km proton deathrace track lay somewhat outside their jurisdiction, located as it is beneath the Franco-Swiss border and funded mainly by other governments.?

Manchester University deaths Ernest Rutherford profile

Ernest Rutherford was a Nobel prize winning physicist who virtually singlehandedly created a new scientific discipline namely nuclear physics.

Sept. 22, 1791: Faraday Enters a World He Will Change

1791: Michael Faraday is born. In his 76 years on the planet, the chemist-physicist will make fundamental contributions to our understanding of electricity and magnetism, advise governments and establish lasting institutions of scientific education. Faraday came from a working-class family and had to go to work after rudimentary schooling in reading, writing and arithmetic. But genius won out. Faraday became a bookbinder's apprentice in his teens and continued his education by reading the books he was binding. An article on electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica inspired him to buy some equipment and conduct some experiments himself. Faraday joined London's City Philosophical Society in 1810 to hear the lectures there and participate in scientific discussions. Then, in 1812, a client of the bookbindery gave the earnest young man tickets to hear a series of lectures by pioneering chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. Thirsty for knowledge, Faraday took copious notes. He organized them, added illustrations and bound them into a book. Faraday secured an interview with Davy, presented him with the bound copy and asked to be hired as a lab assistant. Davy was impressed but had nothing open at the moment. True to his word, however, he did hire Faraday the next year ? at about $10 a week (the rough equivalent of $135 in today's money). A few years later, Davy asked his assistant to follow up on the work of Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted, who had just discovered that an electrical current would deflect the needle of a magnetic compass. Faraday theorized that magnets created force fields, and he designed an experiment that significantly one-upped Oersted in 1821. Faraday suspended a wire above a magnet. When he passed a current through the wire (whose bottom end hung in a dish of conductive mercury), the wire rotated around the magnet, following lines of magnetic force. It was a prototype for the electric motor, using electricity to create motion. It just needed to be scaled up. The discovery was a sensation -- perhaps a little too much of one. Davy, a scientific rock star of his day, was envious. He accused Faraday of stealing the idea from him and tried to block the young man's election to the Royal Society. Davy backed off but never withdrew the charges. Faraday became a Fellow of the Royal Society and lab director at the Royal Institution in 1825. Faraday decided to tread gingerly and shied away from electrical experimentation. He worked instead on analytical chemistry and the compression of gases, discovering benzene in 1825. Davy died in 1829, perhaps from the after-effects of his frequent inhalation of nitrous oxide and other gases, including carbon monoxide. That gave Faraday free rein to resume his work on electricity. He discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. Reversing his effect of using a magnet and electricity to create motion, he used a magnet and motion to generate electricity. No messy, voltaic cells needed, it was the progenitor of steam, hydro and diesel generators. Faraday plumbed the mysteries of electrochemistry in the 1830s, coining such words as electrode and ion, and establishing the laws of electrolysis. But wait, there's more. In 1845, he suspended a heavy piece of glass between the poles of an electromagnet, watching the glass twist into alignment with the magnetic field. Other materials produced the same result, which Faraday named diamagnetism, the propensity of a nonmagnetic substance to create an opposing field in the presence of externally applied magnetism. He also discovered the magneto-optical effect, also called the Faraday effect, that very same year: A magnetic field can rotate polarized light. All this work -- integrating magnetism, electricity, chemistry and light -- eventuated in Faraday firmly establishing the field theory of electromagnetism, a foundation of modern physics. Remembering his own education through public lectures, Faraday founded the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures on scientific topics. They've gone on since 1825, interrupted only during World War II. They've been on television since 1966 and are now supplemented by interactive online features. Faraday also served as a science adviser to British governments for more than three decades. He worked fervently for the electrification of lighthouses. Faraday's name is honored in the scientific world not only by the Faraday effect and the Faraday cage apparatus, but by two electrical units of measure and a physical constant. The farad is the humongous unit of capacitance, equal to one coulomb per volt. Because the unit is so huge, you usually see capacitance measured in micro-, nano- or picofarads. The faraday is a unit of electric charge that can electrolytically deposit one mole of an element or univalent ion. It's equal to Avogadro's number multiplied by the charge of a single electron, or approximately 96.4853 kilocoulombs or 26.8015 ampere hours, and is also known as Faraday's constant. Source: Royal Institution, others

From NYT: Good at approximation? Maybe you are the next math superstar!

Interesting article in the NYT science section on the power of approximation and how those folks who are the best at ball park guessing, may have a natural ability for advanced mathematics. ?When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they?ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,? said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. ?They?ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean?s temperature do fish make, and they?ll try to come up with a plausible answer.? ?What this suggests to me,? she added, ?is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.? So, I had an expensive lunch today. $10, plus $2 worth of iced tea and a $3 tip. But! Two kebabs, a pile of rice, a Greek salad and two lamb chops! It was late, I completed a big and miserable project and wanted to treat myself. Besides, who has lamb chops for lunch?! Anyway, back to the approximating. My lunch was about $15. AIG's bail-out loan from the Fed is estimated at $85 billion. So, that is about 5.6 billion kebab, lamb chop, Greek salad, rice and iced tea lunches. My beloved San Fernando Valley has about 1.8 million people and, if it was a city, it would be the 6th most populous in the nation. If I got a $85 billion dollar loan from the federal government, I could buy about 3000 lunches for everybody in the San Fernando Valley. From the equine estates of Chatsworth to the Tarzana chicken coop of Mark Frauenfelder, from the handmade carnitas of Carrillo's in San Fernando to the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. I could buy 3000 lunches per resident. And let's face it, with two kebabs and two lamb chops, that is a dinner. So, an extremely hearty lunch, a sturdy dinner and I will add two egg McMuffins for breakfast, so, let's see, that would raise the per day costs per resident to about $33. Perhaps that won't get you far in London, but in Los Angeles, that is an ample per diem! At $33 per day, I could buy every resident in the Valley breakfast, lunch and dinner for, hmm, about 3 years? Or I could just buy everybody a new $50,000 Mercedes! NYT: Gut Instinct's Surprising Role in Math (Registration required) Also, from NYT, fun little game to check your mathematic gut instinct (Mister Jalopy is a guest blogger!)...

How a stroll to the office may have solved the universe's biggest mystery

WHILE walking from his home in Edinburgh's New Town to a cramped university office in Roxburgh Street 44 years ago, a young physicist stumbled upon a theory which cou

'Not a waste'

Physicist defends money spent on 'Big Bang' machine

Geek Rap Video Is YouTube Hit

Video of a beatboxing physicist has drawn more than 1 million viewers.

LHC will not destroy the universe in 5 days

In case you're still worried that the universe will wink out of existence in 5 days when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, rest easy: a new report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group says it ain't gonna happen. Or, as one physicist told me when I asked about this last month while researching my Petacentres article for Nature, "Look, it's a 10^-19 chance, and you've got a 10^-11 chance of suddenly evaporating while shaving." The report explains that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies. a The Safety Assessment Group writes, ?Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth ? and the planet still exists.? LHC Switch-on Fears Are Completely Unfounded...

Sept. 3, 1803: Dalton Introduces Atomic Symbols

1803: English chemist-physicist John Dalton starts using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements. Dalton, considered the father of modern atomic theory, made a logbook entry that day titled, "Observations on the Ultimate Particles of Bodies and their Combinations." It was the first use of symbols to represent the elements of modern chemistry. He soon had a table of 21 elements arranged by atomic mass, which he presented in a scientific paper the following month. Eventually, he had 36 different symbols. In his 1805 work, "A New System of Chemical Philosophy," Dalton propounded the tenets of his atomic theory: The chemical elements are made of atoms. The atoms of an element are identical in mass. Atoms of different elements have different masses. Atoms combine only in small, whole-number ratios like 1:1, 1:2, 2:3, etc. Atoms can not be created or destroyed. Dalton's symbols were not the ones we use today, but circles containing distinct symbols (a dot for hydrogen, a cross for sulfur), or circles containing letters (C for copper, L for lead). He used them singly to represent elements and in combination to show compounds. A decade after Dalton formulated his symbols, Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius simplified the system. Half of Dalton's symbols used letters inside a circle to represent the element. Berzelius organized 47 elements with letters alone, and he based those letters not primarily on the English names, but on the Latin ones. In an era when all Europe's learned men (and the few women who were allowed into schools and universities) knew Latin, the shared language was an international lingua franca. All but a handful of Berzelius' symbols are still used today. So it's Au for gold and Ag for silver, not the circled G and S of Dalton's original notation. The simplified notation led the way for English analytical chemist John Newlands to formulate his Law of Octaves and a prototype periodic table of the elements in 1864, but it was Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev who really laid it all on the table with 63 elements in 1869. When he flipped his chart to a horizontal table two years later, he created a form much like what you see in chemistry textbooks and on the walls of chem labs today. Alas, Mendeleev's table was based on atomic mass rather than atomic number, so details like the placement of tellurium and iodine didn't work out. He thought it was a question of inaccurate measurement or other experimental error. It was 1913 before English physicist Henry Moseley reorganized the periodic table by atomic number. As for Dalton, his name lives on as alternate designation for the atomic mass unit or amu. Microbiologists and biochemists need a convenient measure for large organic molecules. Kilo-u or kilo-amu would be awkward, so a protein molecule might be said to have a mass of 35 kilodaltons, or kDA. But it's Berzelius' symbols and what they mean that plague first-year chem students: You've got to "get it" before you can do anything else. Source: History of the Atom, Elementymology